|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Click here for photos of some snack foods sold in a highway rest area. |
21 April 2012
Two considerations: 1. There are many office furniture stores in Phnom Penh, more than I would think is proportional to the size of the business community here, and many of them offer safes like these. Safes are popular because people don't trust banks. A surprisingly large number of businesses have no bank accounts but keep their money in their shops or their homes (which are often combined with their shops). 2. The typical shop here is an open-front establishment with the family living in the backroom or upstairs. The wares are carted out to the sidewalk every morning and hauled back in every night. Can you imagine moving all these safes twice a day?!
20 April 2012
"Hey, the construction crew is living here--there's their laundry--so why shouldn't we start accepting paying customers, too? There's no water or electricity or doors or windows--and you have to climb the scaffolding--but it's dry inside!" 
17 April 2012
This is Sunday morning on the campus of the School of Law and Economics at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. These students are not going to church but to class. Because Buddhists don't have regular church services, especially on Sunday, the weekend becomes a prime time for people to study toward a degree.
14 April 2012
Click here for photos of the motorcycle washing business.
5 April 2012
Across the street from the DDP office, a new building is going up on a small lot. The workers live on the site, on the second floor now that they have added the third and fourth floors. This little boy (top left, in the multicolored shirt) is on the fourth floor, where the current construction is taking place. Probably one of the two women before him is his mother. He's probably not in school because of moving from construction site to construction site and because his mother can't afford the illegal school fees.
28 March 2012
I'm not quite sure what is going on here. On the surface a man is sitting on a stool, reading a book, behind a motorcycle, in a driveway leading into a hotel in Kampong Cham. Maybe he's just an avid reader and the driveway is just a convenient place? Or maybe he's a motorcycle taxi driver waiting for a fare? (But he's dressed more nicely than most moto drivers.) I guess we'll never know what's behind this photo. 
18 March 2012
This is a road near my house where a crew dug five or six ditches perpendicular to the street, across one lane, for reasons that are still not totally obvious. You can tell Cambodia is becoming somewhat westernized:
- The crew put up an actual, purpose-built barricade, made of metal and using green mesh, instead of just putting a tree branch between them and the oncoming traffic
- There is a professionally made sign indicating that this is a joint project between Japan and Cambodia to improve drainage and flood control
- The crew are wearing helmets and reflective vests, and
- Most indicative of western influence, there are eleven people in the crew (count the helmets) with only two of them digging.
17 March 2012
Motorcycle Loads #160 
16 March 2012
"Do we have room for the kitchen sink?" 
15 March 2012
14 March 2012
"Actually they're kinda soft but I get grease spots on my pants...." 
13 March 2012
Click here for info on the mobile phone shops in Phnom Penh
25 May 2011
Click here to see the advertising signs mixed with traffic signs in Phnom Penh
6 March 2012
Street 488 near my house floods every time it rains more than ten minutes. Suddenly on Sunday morning a crew was out on 488 digging ditches half way across the street perpendicular to the traffic. I passed them digging four or five of these ditches and couldn't see what they were doing, but each ditch ended up against a sewer at the edge of the street and a sign said it was a Japanese-funded project for flood control and sewage improvement. We'll have to see what comes from this burst of activity. An interesting footnote was that within a couple hours of the ditches being opened, they were filled in again, and instead of repaving the broken surface, the crew set the pieces of broken asphalt back onto the top of the ditch, like a jigsaw puzzle.
5 March 2012
Click here for pictures of the pajama style in Phnom Penh.
2 March 2012
This little girl is one of the lucky young girls of Phnom Penh, most of all because she's going to school. Many girls and boys don't have that chance. The child is also lucky to be able to walk to school with her mother. The girl may be in a government school or she may be in a private school with a bus (van) service, and if the latter she is definitely lucky to be walking with her mom rather than riding in the overcrowded, poorly driven school vans that careen through the streets twice a day. 
28 February 2012
Click here for pictures of morning rituals in Phnom Penh
24 February 2012
Cambodia houses are not built with closets. Cambodian floor plans are as simple as possible, basically just open rooms, some with one corner blocked off for a toilet. In lieu of closets, metal or wooden cupboards like these are popular for storing anything and everything but especially for dishes and foodstuffs. The ventilated sides allow some air to circulate while the contents are still protected from the rats and mice. These cupboards were part of a trove of surplus furniture and equipment that the Maryknoll Little Folks project made available to the other Maryknoll projects when Little Folks consolidated three offices into one.
19 February 2012
A recurring theme through the pages of this website is that there are no rules in Cambodia. Even if--at the instigation of the United Nations or some donor applying pressure--the government enacts some legislation, its effect is basically nil because it is unlikely to be enforced. Here is a truck, probably heading out of Phnom Penh, heavily laden with a variety of goods, including four motorcycles literally hanging off the back end. They are tied on with just ordinary rope but that is the way things are done here.
18 February 2012
Wedding and funeral dinners take place every day in the tents set up (and blocking) city streets or in the wedding halls. And each table is covered with a tablecloth to disguise that the table is a round wooden top set on a metal frame base. After each meal the tablecloths are washed, and here one company has them drying on the guardrail of an open sewer and on ropes strung across the bed of the truck used to haul the tables around. It makes you think twice about eating anything that falls on the tablecloth.
17 February 2012
It shouldn't be raining now--the rainy season doesn't start until late April or early May--but we had a heavy downpour this morning. I was on the back of a motorcycle going through flooded streets and every time a car would pass, a wave of water would flow into my shoes. It doesn't take much to flood the streets here. Ten to twenty minutes of rain and the water is at least four to six inches deep on many streets. Luckily it runs off in a couple hours and things get back to normal, till the next downpour.
I happened to be at my computer repair shop in the morning during the rain, and the entrance to their place is over a little bridge above what on the maps is a stream but in reality is a channelized open sewer full of filthy black water. It had been raining more than an hour by that time and the water was quite high in the channel.
A few hours later, I was back (to bring them a new hard drive to replace the one that died). The rain had stopped and now the water level in the sewer had dropped a good two feet.
16 February 2012
Most of the pictures on this page feature local Cambodian people but sometimes the foreigners should get their chance to appear here. Last Sunday this father and two of his sons were taking advantage of the nice weather for a bike ride together. The boy in back certainly doesn't have the view that his brother has. 
15 February 2012
Something you don't see much now in the United States and other developed countries is a family riding in the back of a pickup truck. It's not too common in Cambodia, either, but for a different reason--there aren't many pickup trucks here. For the families that do have a pickup truck, there is no law against riding like this, and if there were, it would not be enforced. 
14 February 2012
The Scouting movement is not strong in Cambodia but occasionally you can see boys or girls in their Scout uniforms on their way to school. One day a week or a month they can wear their Scout uniform instead of the regular school uniform. The Scouts in Cambodia are sponsored by the Cambodian People's Party which is a contravention of the Scouting charter which does not permit affiliation with political groups. 
13 February 2012
Major holes in the streets--not just potholes, but real holes!—are not uncommon in Phnom Penh, and the normal response is to stuff branches and other vertical items close at hand into the hole to mark it for unwary drivers of cars and motorcycles. 
4 February 2012
Click here to see the first part of a section on signs to be found on the streets of Phnom Penh.
29 January 2012
Probably in every part of the world parents chase children with bowls of food, trying to get them to eat. It just seems that I see it more often here in Phnom Penh. Maybe that's only because more of life is lived outside in this culture, and the street is like part of the living room. 
27 January 2012
Recently the cable on my bicycle's righthand caliper brake broke and I drove with just the back brake for a few days. Then I remembered a small bike shop near the deaf office so I went over there instead of riding across town to the shops I usually use. The young man said that he could replace the cable, but instead of just opening a package with a new one, he started browsing through this stack of used bicycles until he found one that had the kind of cable that I needed. He took it off the stacked bike, put it on mine, adjusted it, and charged me 75 cents. 
1 January 2012
