Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

In areas with a large informal economy, it is not unusual to find vendors with the same type of merchandise setting up for business right beside each other.  People like it because they know where to go to find certain merchandise and they have a wider range of goods to choose from.

These are mobile pop-up shops selling clothing along Street 63 in the Boeung Keng Kang I area of Phnom Penh.  They are set up alongside the wall surrounding a high school so there is no interference on that side of the street with local comings and goings.

Click here to see the variations in the mobile pop-up shop wagons.

Last month I posted some pictures of piles of coconuts being sold along Street 63.  If you don’t live in that area, this man will bring them to you.

The tropics are great incubators for big bugs and we have our share of big cockroaches.  We have so many of them that the locals just take them for granted and don’t even react to them.  They are very active at night and on any trip down to the kitchen after dark, they will be in full control–running all over the kitchen counter (where this one is) and going in and out under the backdoor.  And then on any given morning 3-5 of them could be lying on their backs dead or moribund in the kitchen, another 2-3 in the breakfast area, another few in the living room, etc.  They are just a fact of life.  I was really surprised yesterday because I was in a parking lot and one big roach started sauntering across and a Cambodian man stepped on it!  Usually it’s only the foreigners who freak out at them.

It rains almost every afternoon now in the Cambodian rainy season and there was a light rain this evening as I came back across town after a wedding rehearsal.  Here is how some people coped with the wet:

This is a combination shop you wouldn’t see much in the US.  On the left is a small eatery, selling pre-cooked foods selected by the customer from large pots hopefully covered with lids to keep out the dust.  Muslim customers (this is near a Muslin neighborhood) can eat with no qualms because the sign assures all the food is halal.  On the right, in the contraption on wheels made from chicken wire and shelves, the proprietors are selling all sorts of metal hand tools and utensils–machetes, axes, shovels, hoes, scythes, etc.  To protect their merchandise and their customers, they are hanging a tarpaulin to block the sun and rain.  They are tieing it to the telephone lines, probably figuring it won’t bother anyone–and probably figuring that half of them are non-functioning anyway.

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.