Not what you expect

Asian people generally don’t bake. Most of their land is in rice and they don’t have wheat. As times and tastes change, though, many bakeries like this one are springing up in Phnom Penh. I come from a family where Mom baked a pie or cake or cookies almost every day but that’s not what you find here. Go into one of these bakeries looking for doughnuts or rolls or kuchen (or even an eclair, as the name of this place suggests) and you will be disappointed. These places are usually an initiative of a stay-at-home-mother who wants to start a small business like everyone else. She bakes a few cakes, seen in the display case, and creates other cakes to order, but it’s not a business driven by volume—and the cakes are certainly not like mother used to make!

Moving Stuff

Here are three examples of people moving people or stuff on a Sunday morning as I was motorduping across town to the 10:00 AM mass.

Moving the kids around on motorcycles.

Moving six bags of crushed ice.

Moving a whole lot of some kind of fried bread.

Welcome Rain

Yesterday we got the first real rain of 2019, probably the beginning of the wet season. It was very welcome. It made the green leaves brighter and washed the dust off the metal roofs and lowered the temperature 5 or 6 degrees
The rain brought welcome relief to many people and also to this cat. In the first photo above, she’s sitting in the second-floor window of the house across the street, waiting for the rain to stop so she can get back to her mousing.

Exam Time

Usually when I arrive at the Salesian Sisters school at 6:00 AM for mass, there are few of the students around and about. Today, though, these two were up-and-at’em, up early to cram for the second day of exams at the end of the second semester. They weren’t alone as you can see in the view into the cafeteria window where most of the student body was gathered to study before breakfast.

Power Cuts

My digital clock and everything else was off this afternoon as the recently started daily power cuts continued. The power cuts alternate between morning and afternoon: yesterday the electricity was off for 5.5 hours in the morning and today it was off for 5.5 hours in the afternoon, returning at 5:30 PM. The government knows better than to cut power at night when everyone is at home.

The power situation has been bad throughout the almost twenty years I have been in Cambodia. It improved a bit a few years ago when power transmission lines were erected to buy power from Vietnam. But now it is the worst it has ever been. The prime minister keeps blaming climate change and lack of rain, but that’s just to avoid owning responsibility for the power shortage. After all, he has been in power for 32 years. Either he didn’t see the power problems coming, or he did see them and didn’t plan for them. Either way it reflects rather badly on his leadership.

Give me water…

All day long this man sells sugar cane chunks to chew and suck on. Sugar cane juice is a most popular natural drink that is squeezed on the streets by vendors pushing their carts. Confronted by sugar cane all day long, though, this man, when he really gets thirsty, pulls out a thermos of water from underneath his cart.