Apples

I was heading out to go shopping; I walked from my apartment toward my moto and on the way I saw a lady pushing a well used old bicycle with a large wicker basket on the back. The basket had dragon fruit and apples. The apples were medium to small in size and they looked fresh. Fruit was on my shopping list, I stopped and asked the price, $1.00 a kilo for apples, that's half the price in the market. They smelled very good. I asked for one kilo then upped my order to two kilos. I did not see a scale; I guess she just estimates the amount. She put the apples in a clear plastic sack, then she reached into a pocked and pulled out a very small round spring scale (like one you would use for weighting fish). She weighed the sack, added one apple and had exactly two kilos. 


As I walked toward my apartment I looked down at the bicycle's front tire. It was flat and appeared to have been that way for some time. She was using the bicycle as a carrier not as a means of transportation.

Flatiron laundry

In Kampong Cham my landlord did my laundry, in Phnom Penh I take my laundry about 100 meters to a local family who does it.

The price seems a little high but so far everything in Phnom Penh seems a little higher than Kampong Cham. I have been spending about $3.00 a week at the laundry.

On my fist visit I noticed the husband ironing using an antique flatiron, one very much like my daughter Karen has. Karen's is used for decoration or a door stop, here it is still serving its intended purpose.

As I walked up the first day, the man had just finished ironing a shirt; he took the iron over to the charcoal burner which was just outside the door, picked up long tongs and placed two pieces of red hot charcoal into the iron, closed the top, locked it and went back to ironing.

The day I took the photo of the charcoal burner, his wife was cooking something on it. 

Dinner on the street

After walking around my neighborhood taking photos for an hour, I was tired and ready for dinner. I stopped in at a restaurant I have been to several times. I looked at the menu, to do that you lift the lids on the five pots sitting on the gas stove top. The most appetizing was a beef soup with vegetables. There was a rice gruel that did not look at all appetizing.

I took my normal blue chair at the table on the sidewalk, while the woman ladled up the soup. 

Dinner was served. It was very good. I am not sure what the vegetable was but that is not uncommon in Cambodia for me.



I have taken photos of the woman's son and did again today. After I took his photo he disappeared back into the house and appeared again with a drawing board of two shrimp (I think).

Starvation averted I headed home to process my photos.

Boat race training

Work has been a little busy this past week. Thursday I left the office at 23:00. I made a promise to myself that I would not do work work this weekend.

Saturday morning I went with a group of VSO volunteers to photograph their practice for the boat race during the water festival in November. VSO took two pickups full of volunteers to the training location. They were practicing with a village that has one of the long boats. When we arrived one of the volunteers remarked how dusty I was. In Cambodia during the rainy season roads are either sticky mud or dry and dusty. Today was dry and dusty.

The whole village got into the act. The children watched as the volunteers were trained in the proper technique of paddling (done on dry ground.)

About lunch time the complete village gatherer around the boat (about 15 meters long) and tipped it upright, then moved it out of its house and into the water.

I watched as the villagers handed paddles and bailing pans to the kids in the boat. I asked one of the volunteers if they would be bailing and she seemed quite surprised that the boat leaked.

As the boat was parked five children took a small boat out and showed off their speed and maneuvering.

The volunteers loaded and off they went. I did not stay; I needed to get back to town to run several errands. 

 I hope they made it back.

Left turn in Phnom Penh

After lunch I took a new colleague to purchase a sim card (mobile phone chip) for his phone. This was only the second time I have has anyone else on my moto with me. The tires were a little low on air so the ride was soft and a bit wobbly. When I am alone on my moto, I can get around smoothly, with a passenger I was a bit more careful.

To get the phone store we went up one of the main boulevards and turned right, crossed another boulevard and we were there. When we left the phone shop, I calculated that the safest way back was the way we had come.

We crossed the first boulevard and stopped at the light where we would turn left on the other boulevard. I did a standard Cambodian left turn at a light, as soon as the light turned green (or a little before) I cut sharply left to cross in front of the oncoming traffic. Good turn. Not so fast Tom.

About 20 meters down the boulevard were two policemen. One stepped out into the lane and motioned me over. Oh OH. My thoughts were, "this was a normal Cambodian turn. What's the problem?" The policeman only spoke Khmer. In English I asked "What's the problem?" He explained and explained motioning at the light this way and that way. I said "I am sorry but I don't speak Khmer." Then he drew a very poor sketch of the intersection and tried to explain it what way. My refrain was "I am sorry I don't understand I don't speak Khmer."

The other police man took over in Khmer. My response was the same. While all of this was going on my passenger was patiently waiting on my moto. After about five minutes of this, the first policeman called on his radio. Oh reinforcements.

Shortly policeman rode up on a moto. He looked at my driver's license and said American said I could go. Whew!!!

The trip back to work was uneventful after that.

More about my new job

My new job is great, but it has taken a lot of time over the last weeks. I have been putting in long hours which have left no time for blogging.

My new job is working for Digital Divide Data (DDD) an international nonprofit. We provide digitization services, data entry, XML conversion and digital preservation needs of publishers, libraries, content hosts, academic researchers and businesses world-wide. The social mission is to provide job and educational opportunities to our staff (under privileged Cambodian youth) that empower them for brighter futures.

You ask, "Why am I so busy?" The answer is that DDD has just started a new project for a client in the USA, JSTOR who is a not–for–profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive of over one thousand academic journals and other scholarly content.

At the moment the project is in a pilot phase. There are two partners and DDD, one partner scans the input from JSTOR, the other provides storage and processing and DDD provides the manual labor to convert scanned images into a computer usable format. As in any project start-up there have been some issues that need to be worked out, luckily this project is having less than the normal amount of concerns. The big reason I have not had a lot of free time, is that with the 12 hour time difference between Cambodia and the USA, I have been working a normal day and then staying up to talk to the partners in the USA.

For example, this morning I was up at 05:00 to check what the partners had done yesterday their time and tonight I will be up until about 23:00 to follow up with them on what was accomplished today.

Driving in Phnom Penh

Over the past week I have been going to work early and leaving work late thereby missing rush hour traffic. Today I was tired and left work at 17:30 in the height of rush hour. When I pulled my moto on to the street I thought "Oh yes, I had forgotten how bad traffic is during rush hour."

Looking at the intersection 50 meters to my left, I thought, "Should I go around the block and try the intersection up the street?" I replied to myself "Self, it will be just as bad there."

I headed off to the intersection. I was lucky, as I approached the intersection a car was going my way and he blocked traffic. GREAT!

Traffic was normal, people coming at me on the right side, and one moto flying out of no where from my right front crossing the lane right in front of me.

I approached the light where I would turn left onto a main boulevard. As I was 100 meters from the intersection I watched a car going my way drive into the one coming lane and go all the way up the intersection. I thought "OK, he is in the left lane, he will most likely pull a Tom and make a quick left hand turn." So much for my assumption." He turned on his right blinker. He wanted to make a right hand turn from the left hand lane.

I had the pleasure of cutting him off.

Restaurant review Restaurant Kim Try with Pink chairs

On the way home from work I stopped at a different restaurant on one of Phnom Penh's main streets. The kitchen is in front of the restaurant on the sidewalk.

Just in front of that there was a glass case with sausage, fish, pork and chicken hanging; I was surprised; there were very few flies around.   The kitchen was four very large pots filled to the brim with dark liquid and bulging items sticking out of the water. I could not tell what was in the pots.

The woman tending the pots told me that I could have "pork leg". I looked at the middle pot and it looked like there were several pork hocks with the skin on soaking in a very dark brown liquid.

She asked if I wanted fried rice or rice porridge. I looked at the bowl of rice porridge and said fried rice. The porridge looked like water with just a little rice thrown in to say it was porridge.

The chairs were bright pink, tables were a thin metal with wobbly legs, some had bare metal tops and others had sticky shelf paper decorating them.


On the table was a very small bowl with soy sauce and another with about 1/3 cup of the of sliced extremely hot red peppers. I normally use one or two slices of these peppers to warm my soy sauce. This many peppers would take care of me for a year. There was another sauce in a similar bowl that appeared to be made with beans, I tired the sauce but could not determine the main ingredient.

My fired rice arrived, there was enough rice for two people, the "pork leg" arrived, and it was also large. The pork hock was dark brown resting on a bed of very well cooked vegetables which were the same color.

When I saw the meat, I thought "this will be an expensive meal." I pealed the skin and fat from the meat and bone. For a Cambodian meal there was a lot of meat and there were no splinters of bone. The pork had a flavor with a faint hint of cinnamon.

As I ate the pork, I thought "this is the most meat I have had in Cambodia." I knew that much meat would be expensive. I was still surprised when the bill came, $7.00.

Coke Cola

Walking through Phnom Penh's central market a vendor, selling a coke cola, caught my eye. You're wondering what is special about selling a coke cola.

I watched as the vendor opened the glass coke bottle and poured the contents into a small plastic sack. Then she took the coke bottle by the top and used the bottom of the bottle like a hammer to chip off four pieces of ice from a large block. She placed the hammer back in the rack of empties, picked up the pieces of ice and put them in the plastic sack. Then inserted a straw and carefully tied the sack to seal it. She handed the sack of coke to the customer.

I have wondered why drink stands always have a case partly full of empty coke bottles.

From Kampong Cham to Phnom Penh

On moving day, a Toyota Camay arrived at 07:15, we loaded all of my things, which have seemed to multiply 10 times in just four months. The car leads the way to Phnom Penh and I followed driving my moto.

In the USA and Europe when embarking on a long trip in a car, I always put a little extra air in the tires to give better grip and increase the gas mileage. I did the same for this trip. As rough as the roads are in Cambodia that was not a good idea. About half way, the car turned to take the new bridge over Tonley Sap. The bridge may be new but the road to it is old and very rough. I really questioned the merits of pumping up the tires on this part of the journey.

It was about 125 km (78 miles) from Kampong Cham to Phnom Penh. When I have taken the bus I enjoy watching the scenery, there are people working in the rice paddies, motos scurrying every which way and people in their daily lives along the road. On this trip there was no time for looking around; I had to keep my eyes on the road. Dodging pot holes, other motos and avoiding oncoming traffic took all of my attention.

The driver said he knew Phnom Penh and the way to the guest house. We were about six blocks from the guest house and the car passed the turn. I raced up alongside the car dodging other motos and singled him to follow me. I was quite lucky that I had stayed at this guest house before and was familiar with the area; I could lead the last kilometer.

When I got off the moto, I noticed I was shaking. I am not sure if that was from the bounding around for three hours of riding or the scares on the road.