Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

The last couple years the power situation in Phnom Penh improved but recently–in 2022–things have taken a turn for the worse. We have had more and more outages, some of them several hours long. We had one yesterday that lasted about 40 minutes and it turned out it was because of the above snake. He paid the ultimate price for inconveniencing a large part of the city.

Street food is a major part of life in Phnom Penh. Some of the little stands and stalls and carts are available only in the morning, others only at night, some all day long.

This is a neighborhood pagoda (wat) getting its gates repaired or replaced. These compounds dot the city like Catholic parishes in a US city and are often the same size, taking up much of a full city block.

Cambodia has made some real improvements in its drive to move from a least-developed country to a medium-developed country. Not all improvements have been substantive and enduring, though. Take electrification. Just five or six years ago only 27% of the country had electricity. Today many more people have power–most of the time.

Sunday night some time after midnight I woke up and realized the power had just gone off. My fan was off and the white noise machine was silent. I figured there was nothing I could do about it and went back to sleep. Then the power coming back on 3 1/2 hours later woke me again because it made my electric alarm clock play a jingle.

Then in the Khmer Times newspaper we got this little article where the electricity company apologized for some error that knocked out the lights for all of Phnom Penh (1+ million people) and the surrounding counties and even Siem Reap 200 miles away.

When I got up I took a shower but then the water went off. It turns out the loss of electricity knocked out the water system, too!