Our Home

Or in Khmer:

As we mentioned in a previous post, we live in an apartment on the top floor of a family home in the South of Phnom Penh. As the map below shows, it's quite convenient for work for both of us and it's also handily situated for the local markets. Phnom Penh isn't a particularly big city - about one and a half million inhabitants and about 8 km from top to bottom of the map, although the city itself sprawls on for about another 2 or 3 km North and South, and some 5 km West to the airport. In the middle, though, nowhere is much more than twenty minutes away by bike.

Don't be misled by the apparent large swathes of green on the map, especially by the river to the East of Perry's office. These are largely areas of wasteland, often inhabited by the very poor. Phnom Penh is improving and modernising, but there's an awfully long way to go in some parts. What do exist are the lakes both North and South of the city. However, don't get the wrong impression; these are not idyllic picnic spots where you might take in a little sailing on a Sunday afternoon.

The Northern one is quite pretty and has a couple of bars where you can sit and watch the sun go down (albeit over the shanty town) but you really wouldn't want to fall in or drink it, because you won't be the first human product that's been in it. It's called Boong Kak: just say it in a Yorkshire accent and you'll get the idea. It's covered in a floating plant called morning glory which acts as a natural waste recycling system. It's also one of the favourite vegetables in Khmer cooking, so it's best to give it a bit of a rinse before eating.

You can see a thin blue line running North to South next to our house and down to the Southern lake; we have named this the Suej Canal. Because we're up on the second floor, most of the time we don't notice it but, when the wind's in the wrong direction, it can sometimes be just a touche niffy. Perry has to ride right alongside it for a while when going to and from work: this is good, as it encourages him to cycle very fast and get fit.



Fortunately, there is also a local remedy. As a Buddhist country, you can buy incense sticks here by the bushel and when we want to sit on the balcony we just light up a few. They completely obliterate any residual pong when it's there and actually smell wonderfully exotic into the bargain. Burning mosquito coils also helps, as well as giving us a fighting chance of not catching Dengue Fever.



So, time for a walk-through of our humble abode. This is our entrance seen from street level



And this is where we're heading - the top floor balcony.



First we go through the private executive parking lot for our company vehicles. In Khmer, bicycle is kong and to ride a bicycle is chi kong. Hence Perry's big rusty silver bicycle is King Kong and Sarah's dinky red one is Chi-chi. We have no idea whose the third one at the back is - it just appeared there one day and has never left. We suspect a combination of visiting VSO friends and alcohol might be behind it, but we just don't know.



After this are the stairs. There are another two flights after this, and they get narrower as they go up. There's also exactly 6 feet of headroom, which is particularly handy for 6 ft 1 Perry.



On arrival, we enter the kitchen. You can see the big water filter on the right: all drinking and cooking water has to be boiled and filtered to get rid of any little visitors. Of course, when you eat out, they're sometimes just ever so slightly less rigorous.



Yes, that is the cooker where the poor little kettle met its untimely end.

Next we go through the combination railway carriage corridor / dining room / state receiving room. The furniture at the back is solid hardwood and is unbelievably heavy. We have no idea how they ever got it up the stairs in the first place; perhaps they dug the rest of the house out from underneath it. However they did it, we can understand why it's still here.



Now we have a choice - turn right for the guest bedroom, left for the main bedroom or straight on for the sitting room. Let's go left!



The boudoir. Note the obligatory mozzie net on the bed. At the moment, we have two volunteers down with Dengue and another with Typhoid. Three more have just got over Dengue, one over Typhoid and another two over Malaria. Must run the stats and sort out a probability curve on those numbers at some point - or perhaps not. No-one's down with dysentery at the moment but we have three loos for the two of us, just in case. Plus three showers and a bath, which also has a shower in it, making four. Two of them (sadly, not including the bath) even have warm water. No, we didn't mean hot.

We've been advised by a friend who claims to be a doctor that the prophylaxis for all these tropical ailments is to just refuse to go down with any of them. Since this person is one of three volunteers up North in Stung Treng, and since the other two form 40% of the Dengue figures, she must know what she's talking about. Actually, the two doctors in our group are both quite inspirational and, frankly, Cambodia is lucky to have people of such quality volunteering to come here. More importantly, they're both also jolly good fun. Our lawyers told us we had to say that. Actually, we think there's a posting about the crowd that needs to be written soon...



Yes we did crack and buy a second hand Japanese washing machine which you can see bottom right; the choice is either an old second hand Japanese machine or an even older second hand Japanese machine. Bizarrely, none of them heat water at all (in fact Cambodians themselves never do washing, or washing up, in hot water, which helps enormously with the "just don't allow yourself to go down with it" approach).

Our machine does get things clean though and frees up our precious spare time enormously despite its age, although Perry thinks it was probably made out of recycled Zeros shot down during World War II. Sarah bought it with the help of her office friend Sopha one lunch time. THAT story is going into the 'shopping blog' by itself.... And as for Perry e-mailing Japan to see if there were any instructions for it in English! The response was interesting; we're now waiting for an offer from the Japanese National Washing Machine Museum. Or possibly the Japanese Air Force Museum.



The bedroom also hosts our little office area, where we e-mail, blog, skype and quite often work when the ultra-high-tech IT systems at our offices aren't operating at 100% efficiency. This can be due to number of factors:

1. There's been another power cut (although, to be fair, these only happen on days with a y in them).

2. The system is refusing to update because it claims that you're running pirated software (for those who know South East Asia, who'd have thought it!).

3. You can't get spares for valve-driven equipment any more.

And now back out to the living room.



And, at last, we reach the balcony. Here's a panoramic view.

Just to make the horticulturalists amongst you drool, here's one of the four orchids we bought recently for the princely sum of £3.25. That's for all four. Including the pots, liners and hanging things.



We don't even have to water them every day either: this is the view from the balcony when it's raining.

No, it doesn't look like a monsoon, it IS a monsoon. And not a heavy one by Cambodian standards, but we don't have any clips of those as they always seem to happen when we're out somewhere. Having gone there by bike...

More soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.

And remember - just say no to Dengue.

Food, Glorious Food

Considering the history of Cambodia over the last decades of the 20th Century, it's perhaps not too surprising that Cambodians will eat just about anything. To mark the anniversary of her 21st birthday (OK, the 19th one), our friend and colleague Caroline organised a day out for a group of us on a Khmer cooking course, so we've now learned how tasty many of these things can be.

The course took place on the rooftop of a house near the Royal Palace, where ten of us aspiring chefs did our best not to stab or burn ourselves or each other for a whole day. We each had a cooker, stone mortar and pestle and a selection of very sharp knives, so it wasn't easy. Our teacher was a young Cambodian chap who really knew his onions.

The first part of the course, though, was a visit to the market. Although all the ingredients we were going to use had already been bought for us first thing that morning, we were introduced to the various vegetables, fruits and, especially, herbs that we would be using during the day.



Some of them were familiar, some vaguely so, and others definitely not. But what a wonderful assault on the senses they all made!



Meat and fish are to be found in abundance in the markets too, and it's amazingly fresh. If you go to the right markets, it's of excellent quality too.



Fish, though, predominates. Much of it is still alive and most of the rest is processed in some way, either by smoking, drying or salting. The dried shrimps are particularly good and we've been eating them in a variety of ways. The fact that Perry has since found out that the colouring they put in them hasn't been passed as safe for human consumption is a minor issue.



Some of the fish, however, appeals a little less. Hope there are no ex-Royal Navy personnel watching (they'll know what I mean...)



So we went back to the kitchen and started pounding our pestles. We started by making the most wonderful little spring rolls with vegetables, herbs and crushed peanuts. That was our mid-morning snack.

Caroline admires Perry's pinny. Well, someone has to.

While digesting our delicious appetiser, it was time to get artistic. Below is a picture of the carrots we carved with our very little, but wickedly sharp, curved knives. Surprisingly, only one of the group managed to add human finger to the mix (and it wasn't either of us).



After that, we moved right on to preparing lunch: a banana flower salad. Banana flowers are odd, awkward but excellent. They look a little like an ear of corn that still has its sheath of outer leaves on at first, but once you peel off the outer layers, they are in fact made up of tightly packed layers of what seem to be a cross between leaves and petals. They are firm and crisp and, when sliced thinly, excellent to eat. However, slicing them has a couple of challenges. Although they don't feel sticky to the touch, once cut they exude a thick sap that does two things: first, it turns the cut pieces from a lovely creamy colour to an unpleasant-looking black. At the same time, the sap turns into a glue that will NEVER come out of your clothes. The solution is to put each piece into a bowl of water with lime juice in as soon as you cut it. We managed to do this step without anyone getting stuck. We then added herbs, crushed peanuts, carrot, some boiled chicken, dressing made from fish oil, ginger, chillies and shallots, and tucked in. It was good.

Then it was time to create the pièce de résistance: a dish that is uniquely Cambodian, Amok fish. Amok is a Cambodian curry that is made with coconut milk, lemon grass, turmeric, chillies and the most exquisite herbs that give it a unique and delicious flavour. It's one of the most popular dishes in the country, and it's easy to understand why. At once mild yet spicy, soft and creamy yet firm and crisp. And yes, ours were just like that! Steamed and served up in banana leaf bowls that we also made ourselves, it was a real treat.

And for afters, we made sticky rice with fresh mango and caramel sauce: 'nuff said. The day inspired all of us to cook more Khmer food and also took away some of the fear of getting the wrong ingredients. Because, believe us, you can also get it wrong. Some food items here can be just a little less yummy.

One item, dished up as part of the 'salad' that came with a traditional Khmer meal that Perry shared with his work colleagues recently, is a case in point. At first glance, it looked like sliced cucumber: Perry's first mistake. His second mistake was to be unable to pick up a single slice with his chopsticks and to just go for stuffing a whole wodge into his mouth instead. It wasn't cucumber. Looking on closer examination like a cross between a cucumber, a banana and a hedgehog, it's actually the vegetable equivalent of a dementor: first it sucks all the saliva out of your mouth, then all the moisture out of your body, then gets started on your will to live. And all the while it adds insult to injury by tasting foul too. A true seventh circle of unpleasantness, the longer it's in your mouth, the more it expands, becoming an ever-increasing combination of blotting paper, fibre and bitterness. Interestingly, no-one else appeared to be eating any of it.

A few other unusual items turned up in the same meal. Many of you will know that Sarah has eaten fried crickets brought in to work by her colleagues. They were delicious and tasted like the very best shrimp and Sarah will eat all that you can catch (poor Jiminy: Pinocchio will miss him so). Perry has now matched this by eating steamed bee larvae, dished up looking rather like a honeycomb wrapped in tinfoil. Quite delicate, a bit like soft skate meat with just a hint of honey - but probably not going to catch on as the next big thing in pub grub. We also had some excellent beef from Mondulkiri province, some delicious liver from goodness knows where or what, and some river eel that achieved the Tardis-like feat of containing more and bigger bones than an elephant's graveyard within one finger-thin body. But the coup de grace (literally) was the boiled goat's foot.

How to describe its first appearance? Served up in a tureen, with a cooker-block in the base to keep it boiling. When the lid was removed, in the middle of the seething liquid lay this thing. Cylindrical for most of its length, with one end swelling out to a large mis-shapen lump. Pale yellow-pink on the outside, engorged with the boiling water inside it, and with an extended purple-pink semicircle sticking out of a sheath of the pale outer covering at the opposite end to the lump. And huge, truly huge. One of the crowd reaches out and pokes a knife into it...

Like Moby Dick meets Old Faithful, it erupted high into the air. And came down all over your humble correspondent. Fortunately, the boiling liquid went so high that by the time it impacted it had cooled down quite a bit. There wasn't even a decent, shocked pause before everybody burst into laughter (note to VSO: add this one to your list of good multicultural icebreaker techniques). A large segment was carved off as the victim's reward and put on his plate. The horror, the horror. It looked even worse on the plate than it had in the pot: it became clear that it was almost entirely boiled goat skin with something pink and squidgy inside. To be fair, the pink and squidgy bits could be separated from the skin and were quite tasty. But the skin... a warm rubberised slug that didn't want to be either chewed or swallowed. Bring me back the dementor-vegetable! Yes, I will have another beer, please. No, I don't normally down it in one, just on special occasions. Oh no, now I've started a trend.

Oh, and the fermented fish sauce we were supposed to dip everything in was just what you would expect. Stuffing it full of chillies didn't make it taste any better but at least numbed your mouth a bit. Still, you live and learn when eating the food here. If you live, that is.

So, between us, we've now tried quite a few of the local delicacies and, on balance, most of them really are delicious. However, we plan to continue avoiding one or two others - the photo below of our friend and fellow volunteer Helen eating a deep-fried spider shows just how utterly scrumptious she found the experience.

Before we close, we should just point out that the birthday girl, Caroline Creosote, then went on to eat a whole plate of mashed potatos that evening as well (because she likes them, that's why!).



Just one more wafer-thin mint, Caroline?



More soon from the Guide Michelin du Cambodge. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.

The Return Journey

Sarah's trip back home in the evening

Now I am coming back home down 163, parallel to 143 which was where the other pics were taken just so you get a variety. This interesting set of construction has been going, & growing, for weeks - no I can't imagine either. Think it is just part of the whole anti - pedestrian strategy.

Typical set up of some sort of business underneath family homes & a Mum taking her kids home from school.

You usually see this sort of thing being precariously balanced in one hand from a moto & often it is several rigid poles. I am waiting to see what happens when one of them wants to turn a corner.

Yes... that's more like it.

...and how nice that people kindly take their furniture out for a spin

Now... this was interesting.. for some days prior to this, whoever passes as the clerk of works in PP had commissioned an interesting eco - art work in the middle of 163, firstly excavating a representation of the Grand Canyon, & then a few days later recreating the Sahara; great swathes of golden sand appeared one morning, making the the commute just that little bit more of a challenge. We were then treated to the foot hills of Everest. At present it is like the great dusty plains of the American west. What next? Niagara Falls perhaps?

One of the many expert baby moto drivers in the city. My personal favourite was the Dad with a baby under one arm, driving, Mum cuddling another littler one in both arms on the back, with 2 small toddlers squeezed between them. I suppose they would break your fall.

My friend Sokha's (our finance officer at work) mum's hairdressing salon/snackshop/newsagent.
He has now moved into his own house with wife & baby, but until then he would regularly 'happen' to pull up beside me & beg me with the most soulful look to get on the back of his moto to ride to work. It is totally beyond the comprehension of the Khmers why anyone would walk along the streets in the sun etc etc unless they were destitute/a monk/mental. Actually, they have a point.

Ahh... the life blood of the city, the noisy, smelly old generators that we all love to hate, bless them

I turn right here if I want to get fruit & veg at the market on the way home (5 min from home). Please note excellent example of the superb traffic system; I call it Consensual Anarchy - no rules but as long as everyone plays by them it's ok. The motos turning right on the corner are on the 'right' side of the road & so are the ones coming round it from the left, as, if you are coming down a road in between junctions (especially one of the wide main ones) you would never get over to the right-hand side & back in time to turn left. ... Oh DO keep up! ... As there are usually 2 main lanes on each side of the road with another line for the 'hard shoulder' where bicycles & the stuff coming in the opposite direction tend to be, and of course, you can fit 2 or 3 motos or bikes in the space for one car ... you can imagine that you can have anything up to 16 'lanes' of traffic to negotiate should you be foolhardy enough to actually try to cross the road. I live on one side of Mao Tse Tung & the office is a mile or so on the other.

Kids going home from the school in the wat



and another one of those baby drivers

More soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.

The Morning Commute

A sketch of Sarah's early morning journey to work

This is a typical view of what we see as we turn right out of our gate. The monk is a senior one as you can see by his red robe, the orange sunshade is typical. He is making his way up to the wat, collecting alms & dispensing blessings as he goes. One of our friends Vic(toria) is obsessed by monks. Women aren't allowed to touch them, which we feel just adds to the attraction (but they do tend to be young & very handsome too!). Spot the cyclo in the middle of the road & please note the completely colourless shirt. There must be a cyclo uniform shop somewhere.

This is looking back on the other side of the street at the cookshops opposite our house, where all the local moto & tuk tuk drivers congregate for their meals. Every morning without fail I get a call ..'tuk tuk/moto madame?' despite 4 months of polite refusal, this morning I nearly fell off my bike (there's the clue right there) laughing as a moto went past with the same old question. I told him I was willing to give it a try if he was. The dried brown things are coconut husks & used as fuel.



This is as I turn onto Boulevard Mao Tse Tung. Notice I am shamelessly using the scavenger lady as top cover as I know she is about to launch out fearlessly & diagonally into the traffic.



This is one of the reasons you can't walk on the pavements most of the time. These crews of young guys arc welding & steel cutting, are all over the city in their state of the art safety equipment of tightly wrapped kramers (checked Khmer scarves) & sun glasses.



There are some amazingly bling dresses in the tailors on streets 143 & 163. Khmer women (ones with a bit of cash in PP anyway) dress up exactly like Barbie for parties & weddings, full make up & amazing hair dos & their husbands show up in the same old flip flops & shirts they wear every day.



How else would you transport half a ton of rice?



This is another reason for the no go zone on the pavement. Weddings & funerals. Very hard to tell the difference & quite frankly I don't know whether people always do.



We have seen 4 monks on a bike several times. Bear in mind this is just a quarter of the photos from one morning's walk to work & a mere sample of the entertainment I get every day.



You can't see it too well but this is one of the wonderful portable barber's chairs that can be set up at any point. From what I can see, a full service is offered &, judging by the fact that I paid a dollar for the haircut in the salon that has mysteriously materialised in our ground floor parking area, probably for about 20p. Labour and service of any kind is ridiculously cheap. Note the intricate red & yellow tiles that pave the whole city, where they remain of course.



Ah.. all goes quiet as I get into our office street, it is first on the right with the yellow sign. This is before the snail lady, the egg man, the scavenger cart, the brush ladies, the ice cream man & the random dogs get started of course. And whoever it is that starts banging great pieces of metal together just when I want my lunchtime nap. I've come to the conclusion that, apart from the cars & motos, living here is like several hundred years ago in Europe with all the funny little stalls & vendors, dogs & rats, smells & rubbish & the way you can get keys cut, shoes mended, food & drink, medicine, rides to anywhere (as in - they won't have a clue where you're going so you'd better have) & blessings from monks collecting alms all on the street just a few yards from your house

More soon. In the meantime, please don't forget the need to keep supporting VSO through our Justgiving page at www.justgiving.com/jagoteers.