Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

This is an early-morning breakfast drive-thru in Phnom Penh: a wood-burning fire (behind the table), a bucket of batter, and a young woman on the phone putting out deep-fried puffs.

Various groups of impoverished people locate themselves in places where large numbers of people with money are, i.e., at the entrance of the western-style supermarkets, at tourist attractions, etc.  Other groups frequent places where the normal traffic of every day life has to slow down or stop, i.e., at intersections or at the increasing number of traffic lights in Phnom Penh.  When the light turns red, small children or slow, tottering elderly come to the cars and peer in the tinted windows, hoping to sell limes (as in these photos) or flowers or other trinkets.

This auto parts shop has a certain character about it–plus a mongrel dog.

Another fruit is in season.  This time it’s the oranges.  In Cambodia the oranges from Battambang Province are considered the best.

Every Sunday morning this woman sits in the same place selling the same little trinkets made of bronze and ivory and luxury woods.  They are statues of elephants and Buddha, rings, and just an assortment of things.  There are no tourists here but there is always a Khmer person perusing the objects.  Maybe it’s just a nondescript glancing over them while chatting or maybe the person is really interested.  I don’t know.

It’s still pineapple season, and these, already peeled, are definitely tempting.  It looks like the pineapple seller may have stopped to negotiate a trade with the seller of the other fruit.  I don’t know what the smaller round golden fruits are nor do I know what the stack of green stuff is behind them.  This is where it really helps to have someone along who can explain in English what I’m seeing.

This is Thai Huot supermarket, one of the large grocery stores or supermarkets that cater to the foreigners in Phnom Penh.  Lucky Market is the original such market and Thai Huot previously was a much smaller second.  In the last couple years, though, they have expanded greatly and even have this purpose-built store as their newest site.  It still is quite different from a US-style supermarket: it has parking for only five or six cars on the righthand side and it’s two stories, a definite inconvenience if you are purchasing things on both floors and have to carry them up and down stairs or wait for a small elevator.  Still, though, you can get some of the touches of home here and some of the comfort foods you’re used to, to help you deal with some of the quirks and frustrations of Cambodia.

That solves the problem of where to put the live chickens for the ride back to the provinces.  It creates another problem, though, because they drool a lot when hung upside down.

Now THIS is what you call a convenience store–at least as long as you only want bread and don’t mind the layer of dust and the poor hygiene and the smell of exhaust fumes.

Cambodia is a country of subsistence farmers, each family eking out a simple living on a small plot of land–and utilizing every opportunity to add a little more to the family income.  Sometimes that is by selling homegrown vegetables in the market, or selling fruit from the trees around the home from a table on the side of the road.  For this family, it means drying some sort of bean or nut or spice on the expanse of pavement in front of their shop selling pumps, compressors, and ice crushing machines.  This is in Phnom Penh city, not a rural province.