Category: Government and Society

We are in the middle of a three-day holiday for the birthday of King Norodom Sihamoni seen here visiting a family in the provinces.  The king is a really nice person–the only smiling, human face in the government—but why three days for a birthday?  That is why Cambodia has twenty-five public government holidays.  The US has eleven.  How do you rebuild a country when no one works?

This is the Buddhist Center, a very important place in Cambodian Buddhism.  When I first came I was told that there were to be no buildings put up nearby that would overshadow the center and compete with it for importance.  Well, there’s a lot of money to be made in Cambodia now, if you have money to begin with, and so the tycoons in the senate conveniently have arranged for the zoning guidelines to be ignored.