Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

Electric vehicles are becoming more popular around the world but I don’t know if this one is going to attract much attention. It is one of the smallest electric bikes I have seen in Phnom Penh and doesn’t look really comfortable. This is the only one of this model I have seen so may others share my lack of enthusiasm for it.

When Phnom Penh was locked down and no one could leave his/her house, the monks couldn’t leave their pagodas to make their daily rounds begging food and money for the poor and themselves. One sign of a return to something like a previous normal is that now the monks are back on the street every morning.

The woman in the food cart in the foreground is waiting to go around the food cart of the woman with stuff hanging on the fence. The cart in the background is blocking one lane, forcing all the traffic to squeeze through the other side. It doesn’t make any sense but that doesn’t bother Cambodian drivers. That’s the way life is. You just sit there and lurch forward an inch at a time. There is no discipline, no regulation, no enforcement–and everyone accepts that. Basically it’s only the foreigners that are bothered.

She doesn’t look like she’s in the mood for balloons today….

The Pchum Ben holidays are officially over now and society is starting to catch up–slowly. Yesterday, a Friday, was technically a post-holiday work day but probably 99% of the workers took leave to round off a full-week of holidays. One group of workers who had to come back are the garbage crews. As you can see above, there are piles of rubbish along each block of each street because the sanitation workers took off like everyone else.

With all the shops closed for the holidays, you might think there would be little garbage to pick up, but remember Phnom Penhers live in shophouses–buildings one room wide and three or four stories tall–where the first floor is a shop and the rest living quarters. The people are still living there even if the shop is closed so there’s still trash.

One of the areas where Cambodia and Phnom Penh have not caught up with the developed world is trash management. Can you imagine a capital city with no rules or regulations about setting out trash for collection. Everyone just makes a pile on the curb.