''A Cambodia Moment''

There is a phrase a colleague of mine uses out here. She is a 60 odd year old grandmother who decided that she was bored just thinking about retiring and so thought it would be fun to do 2 years overseas – enter VSO…

Every so often she just stops whatever she is doing looks around in awe and wonder of the fact she is living in Cambodia and says ‘I am having a Cambodia moment’

A Cambodia moment can cover many things;

- The first time you see 4 Buddhist monks crowded onto the same moped, orange silk robes flapping in the breeze;
- Looking up from a restaurant table to see that the woman standing next to you is not a waitress, but a street vendor who has randomly wandered in selling deep-fried tarantula, locusts or cockroaches;
- Or just sitting in a riverside bar watching the street theatre that is life in Phnom Penh unravel before you.

I am not sure if it can best be described as a moment of Hyper-reality or one of surrealism.

This morning, due to a mixture of reasons and a confluence of events, I found myself riding from the bottom of the city to the top of the city and back again before going to work. Not a major hassle really as the round trip is only about 10 kilometres. But it was on the way back that I decided to bypass the main road so full of traffic, even at 06:30 it was a sea of mopeds flowing in a chaotic, yet almost poetic motion. So returning downtown towards my office I cut down Street 51, by P’sar Thmay, round to the Independence Monument and down to my office.

As I am taking this route the pavements of the city are busy and bustling with people.

Every back-street-corner has a pavement café set up – blue plastic chairs, folding tin tables and a menu consisting of either noodle soup or rice and pork;
‘Corner shops’ here are people with a desk or trestle-table selling; sweets, bottled water, cigarettes, newspapers, et cetera;
Every other street corner has a man selling bread, a large wicker basket 3 feet in diameter a foot and a half high, full of short wide baguettes – 500 riel each (12.5 cents or 7 pence)

It is not just the sights that contribute to ‘a Cambodia moment’ it is also the sounds and smells.
Phnom Penh is not a quiet city, with 1.3 million people living here. That may not sound much when compared to capital cities back in the West, but Phnom Penh is a very, very, small capital city. 7 kilometres long by 4 wide.
The abundance of pavement restaurants and bread vendors add to the aroma – as do the piles of rubbish outside shanty town housing…

As I am sat here in the office now, all clean and shiny from last month’s refurbishment, the air-conditioning on, lap-top hooked up to the internet, I could be sat in any one of a number of Countries. Think I might go back outside now for a bit; one of those pavement cafés is calling to me – spicy Rice-Pork with an iced coffee or two, mmm.


Best wishes to all, take care

D