Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

We Can Fix It

One of the advantages of a motorcycle culture combined with a mom-and-pop shop culture is that when your vehicle breaks down on the way to work, you don’t pull off and wait for it to be towed. You just push it a couple hundred yards to the next little moto shop and they’ll fix it while you sit and play with your phone.

Cashing In

Right across from the side entrance to St. Joseph Church is this recycling center. Today a girl on a bicycle is bringing a bag of aluminum cans and she will get 25¢ or 50¢ after the lady weighs cans on the green scale. In this culture turning in a load of cans is not an environmentally motivated recycling initiative but rather money for a family.

Still Wet

The heavy rains continued until about 11:00 PM last night. Most of it drained away by this morning–thanks to the Japanese-financed sewer updates–but this street still had some flooding.
In another neighborhood nearer our deaf office, this man was trying to clear some drains in order to avoid such significant flooding the next time.

A Whole Lot of Wet

We’re definitely in the rainy season now, and today was exceptionally wet. It started raining about a half hour before I was due to leave in the afternoon and I didn’t think much about it but just put on my poncho and got on my bike. About a block away, though, I started encountering streets like this and decided it wasn’t worth it and went back to DDP and called a three-wheel tuk-tuk like these above.

Say what?

First there was the “Clobber” clothing store that recently opened. But now I’m wondering about this “bakery cafe.” Where did they get the name “85º Bakery Cafe”? I’ve been trying to figure that out since it opened last year. Is 85º a proper temperature for making coffee or something?

Changing Times

When I first arrived in Phnom Penh, practically every store had an open front like this one. (They didn’t have the bright lighting and signs, though.) Today this type of store front is fast disappearing as more and more shops are enclosed, with actual doors–and some even with air conditioning.

Birds+Nests=Soup

It’s not uncommon to see buildings like the one above dotting the Cambodian landscape….

They are distinctive for two things: first while they may have some vents, like the one above, they have no windows. And second, they have an opening like the one on the left end of the building (right photo) and birds are flying in and out.

You have heard of birdnest soup. This is where they get the birdnests. The birds nest in these rooms and create nests held together with their saliva, and then later the nests are harvested and soaked and made into soup.