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Ash Wednesday is tomorrow and in preparation I spent part of Sunday afternoon burning old palm to make plenty of ashes. I’m thinking we may need more than usual because this year we are to sprinkle them on a person’s head rather than mark a cross on the forehead. We have plenty of palm trees on the grounds of the deaf office and I found a lot of fallen fronds so that wasn’t a problem. [The three white bandages on my right leg are from three dog bites I received on Thursday. More on that later.]
This is something almost never seen in Cambodia: almost every single vehicle stopped for a red light is behind the crosswalk, the accepted norm in western countries. Normally traffic in Phnom Penh does not halt for a light until the front wheel is intruding into the lane of moving cars, causing them to swerve. Cambodians drivers are like others, though, often creatures of habit and copiers of others, and by some strange circumstance the first one to stop for the light must have stopped behind the crosswalk and the others just followed suit without thinking.
Today is the last of the three days of major celebration for the Lunar/Chinese/Tet new year. Click here to see some scenes and notes from this year’s celebration.
There must be a story behind this mother-and-son(?) duo riding down a main Phnom Penh street. Is that everything they own on that bicycle? Where are they from? Where are they going?
Today is New Year’s Eve in the lunar calendar and for the people in the chopsticks countries, the reunion dinner this evening is one of the most important happenings of the year. In non-pandemic times, everyone MUST return home for the meal together.
This is a Khmer-Chinese family next door to the DDP office compound. They are well-to-do by Cambodian standards. As I was going home this afternoon, they were arranging parts of their dinner (the roast pig) and offerings to their ancestors (the paper houses and car and the beer and soft drinks and fruit and incense). And they were well decked out in their traditional red outfits for this glorious night!
You know the lunar new year is getting close when people start to put out their chrysanthemums. You can’t do that too early because they will bloom and fade before the holiday. Click here to see some of the early arrivals.