Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

Here’s where you get your fresh pineapple (husk already removed!), tamarind, and other fruits and goodies. And you can make your purchase without even getting off your motorcycle!

Some events really point out how two cultures think differently and express things differently. Notice the text says the bridge is 77.04% complete. In the U.S., an article would say the bridge is 70% or 8o% complete, or maybe that it’s 3/4 complete. But never would it say it is 77.o4% complete!

And how do you figure a bridge under construction is 77.04% finished? What are you measuring? The amount of time projected for completion? The tons of concrete used already? The length of roadway already laid? How much of the budget has been spent?
[Photo from the Khmer Times]

It is risky in Cambodia for a foreigner to open a bank account with only one name on it. If the person dies or is incapacitated or needs to leave the country quickly, it is almost impossible to recover the money from that account. As a back up, when I set up my ABA bank account, I got a debit card for it and gave it to Maryknoll Sr. Regina with the PIN. In case something happened to me, she could withdraw the money from ATMs.

I never used the debit card and when Regina left, she returned it to me. Recently I wondered where it was and when I found it, I saw it had expired. I put it in my pocket yesterday to go to ABA to renew it, but later in the day it wasn’t in my pocket.

Arriving at home, it worried me that someone could find it and try to use it. It was expired but it still worried me so I went to an ABA branch (they are open 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM every day in Cambodia!) and canceled that card and got a new one.

A few hours later I got a message from the DDP director. Our former social worker called him to say a tuk-tuk driver had found my card and wanted to give it back. And that’s what the driver did this morning. In the photo he is talking to our DDP guard.

I couldn’t understand all his Khmer but he seems to have found it in the street. It had my name on it but how he found out who I was and how to contact me, I still don’t know!

I will never be able to understand Cambodian drivers’ fixation with driving with one wheel over the dividing line on streets. Here my tuk-tuk driver has his left wheel hooked over the line. Notice two vehicles ahead, the car driver has his right wheel over the same line.

Look at this mass of overhead wires on a Phnom Penh street. This is rather unreal even by Cambodian standards!

In a land where there are no building codes–or if there are codes, they are ignored, it can’t be too surprising to find an umbrella seemingly affixed to the front of a building ten or twelve feet above ground. Did it blow up there and get stuck? Did someone secure it in that position? Is so, why? Who knows!

As long as no part of your load is touching the ground, you’re good to go! But not everything that gets loaded on to a moto stays there. This man had his packages secured with packing tape but something gave way and he ended up in the intersection reloading his motorcycle.