My New Khmer Street; Same as the Old Khmer Street ?

Snapshots from my window

Having recently moved into my new home, I have spent several early evenings sat on my new, large, L-shaped balcony. Just watching the world go by and musing on my new location and new neighbours. (I really must buy a television soon)

Diagonally opposite is a small building site where a small office with flats above is being built, a bright, shiny, new blue building of seriously geometric design. Last weekend a surly looking Frenchman turned up to survey his new office building and flat, his Khmer girlfriend was decked head to toe in western clothing and was glinting even in the distance with expensive looking gold and jewellery.

To the left is a small wooden house with a lean-to wooden shop at the front, which sells the usual assortment of shampoo, toilet roll, cigarettes, soft drinks and blocks of ice. At any given time there are usually half a dozen people milling around outside or pulling up on moto’s to buy things.

To the right is another large house which seems to have a constant stream of expensive looking 4x4’s coming and going, some with NGO license plates, some with military police license plates. Yesterday lunchtime I came home to find a shiny new Jaguar S-Type parked outside my side door and one very smug looking Khmer guy leaning against it grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

At the end of my short road, on the corner is a small wooden shack restaurant serving plates of rice and noodles, outside which one usually finds several motodop’s hanging around should one need transport anywhere.

Opposite my door is a small Khmer concrete town house, in the evening around a dozen small children, 8 to 12 years of age, usually gather in the front room to learn English, from my balcony I can hear them reciting:

A is for apple; apple ply_pomm;
B is for book; book seal_pow
C is for car; car laan

And so on…

Underneath on the ground floor, with a completely separate set of entrances and stairwells is my paranoid, highly security conscious, landlord and his family. They have a shop a few road up in P’sar Olympic selling gold and jewellery

During the course of the day, up until the early evening a stead procession of street vendors’ cycle along touting their wares buy shouting out the name of the goods or service they offer; fresh bread, shoe repairs, key cutting and knife sharpening.

As well as these cycling vendors there are the usual assortment of people selling food from wooden or steel handcarts that they push around; Chinese dumplings, papaya salad bok la’hong, rice pork bai suh_ch’rook, or whatever the current seasons fruits are.

Towards the end of the day, as traffic grows light, but before daylight totally abandons us, it is quite common to see several kids playing badminton, without a net, in the middle of the road, just bating the shuttlecock back and forth for fun, elsewhere, street children are sifting through the rubbish outside peoples houses looking for empty cans or bottles that can be resold for recycling – two empty drinks cans (coke, beer, et cetera) sell for 100riel - that is 2.5cents or just over 1 shiny new British penny.

These are scenes that anyone living in Cambodia, especially Phnom Penh, will be familiar with. After all the stress and hassle of moving house, they are strangely reassuring.