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When I was a kid, the Tastee Bread company trucks—emblazoned with the slogan “Baked while you sleep”—rumbled around early-morning Louisville delivering bread to the grocery stores. This woman’s bread is also probably baked while everyone is sleeping, but she doesn’t have any truck with a logo and has to be content with singing out “Num bung,” the Khmer word for bread, to alert her customers.
Different fruits can mark the change of seasons in Cambodia but not coconuts. They’re available all year round and just about everywhere. There are cheap, nutritious, and delicious so they are a favorite with much of the population. Here are three coconut vendors along Street 63 in Phnom Penh.
From the vendors’ point of view, the downside of coconuts is that they are big, heavy, and bulky and you can’t stack them like you can cases of beer. The white coconuts have had the green outer hull cut off, mainly for a better-looking product although cutting off the hull also helps the coconuts to chill faster when you throw them into the ubiquitous orange coolers.
Quite a few fruits are in season now. Today I saw pineapples being sold on the streets. Vendors like these tend to stay on the outskirts of the city, probably because it’s closer to home in the rural areas and probably because the police hassle them less there for bribes.
It’s not just the oranges that are in season now. Pomelos are also plentiful and they are one of my favorite fruits.
I have mentioned before that one of the ways to tell the seasons here is to note which fruits are being offered on the street. That’s one of the only real indicators since it’s always hot and everything is always blooming. Now it’s the turn of the oranges to appear. Most of them are from Battambang, renowned for oranges, and they are all green in color, not orange. They are good, though, and once in season, many vendors are selling the oranges by the kilo (about $1.75) or as bottles of freshly squeezed orange juice.
This is an old traditional wooden house a block from the Maryknoll office where I live. There aren’t many of these left in the city where they have been replaced by concrete dwellings or even by multi-story apartments and office buildings.
When you buy your shoes on the street like this, you choose by size, not by style. For any given style, there may be only two or three sizes offered–maybe only one, so you try on the different styles that fit and then pick the pair that you like best. These places do a lot of business.
Actually that headline’s not true–it’s not the sky that is the limit but the wires hanging low over Phnom Penh streets that puts a limit on the height of this load of snack foods like potato chips
Recently I posted a picture of a deep pothole near my house. Or maybe it would be more accurate to call it a sinkhole. It opened up in a hole several feet deep. Today I ran across another one. The local populace is really good about trying to mark such disasters-in-waiting but the question is why they keep appearing on roads that have relatively recently been paved? This is the third hole within a mile of my house. Does anyone in officialdom notice these? Do they actual do anything about them, as in requiring the contractor to come and repair it? Or telling the street department to do it? There’s no sign of such initiative.
It’s laundry day for the guard at our house in Phnom Penh. He’s lucky because he can use our washing machine although he still has to line dry his clothes because I have never seen a dryer in the kingdom. Washing clothes is a typical scene, here and around the world. Peculiar to Cambodia would be the spirit house for those ethereal beings displaced when our house was built and the helmet at the base of the spirit house, turned sunward to kill the lice.