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.