Category: Daily Life in Cambodia

Topics: Oranges

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 young man is squeezing orange juice right on the street.
Selling oranges is not difficult. All that is needed is the small platform, six or eight inches off the ground, that is widely used. And then if you are selling orange juice, too, you need the squeezer and the cooler to keep the juice cold.
This woman has already been hard at work and has her orange juice out on display.
This man has lots of oranges and lots of empty bottles piled up behind him, and probably the family is inside squeezing the juice.

 

 

Going Fast

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  There aren’t many of these left in the city where they have been replaced by concrete dwellings or even by multi-story apartments and office buildings.

Choose by Size, Not by Style

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.

Another Hole

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.

Scene from Daily Life

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.

Small Town Economy

Yesterday’s post showed one aspect of the Cambodian economy–working on the floor–and here is another.  This is in front of Thai Huot supermarket, the second largest supermarket group in Cambodia and a woman is unloading from her SUV a carload of white bread.  She and her family probably bake it in a small bakery in their home and then drive it around to the two or three Thai Huot outlets in Phnom Penh.  It exemplifies the small scale operations that characterize Cambodia business.

Preference for the Floor

This woman working in a curtain shop illustrates a cultural aspect of life in Cambodia: much of life here is lived on the floor.  Poor rural families could not afford tables, chairs, etc.—and didn’t have houses that would support furniture (remember most of the houses were bamboo slat floors on frames up on stilts)—and so the people cooked, ate, slept, played, and worked on the floor.  Those people moved to the city and continued the same life style so that it is common to see people sitting on the floor doing any number of different jobs.

Looking at Each Other

Going across town to mass early one morning I caught this picture of a little boy playing on the back of a truck.  He was looking at me as I took the picture, and down in the lower left corner you can see me (in the rearview mirror) looking at him.  I was shooting the pictures from chest level so you can’t see the camera.