We are living in a great old French Colonial house in Phnom Penh -- or maybe camping out is a better term in that our household furniture remains in the grip of the Cambodian Customs Service (absent the "Diplomatic Note" that will free our car from customs), the problem is that our car is in the same shipping container as our furniture, ergo, no furniture (and no car).
So we have bought enough furniture locally to get by. This first photo is our bedroom. In it you can see our truly amazing Cambodian bed, which is estimated to be somewhere between 75-125 years old. While it is hard to tell from this photo it is composed of two mahogany planks, each 30 inches wide and about 1.5 inches thick, laid across two mahogany feet. To truly appreciate this I would have you go down to your local lumber dealer and ask him for a piece of immaculate mahogany 7 feet long, 30" wide, and 1 1/2 inches thick. After they stop laughing you'll begin to appreciate this bed.
The bed is tastefully accented by the steel garment racks covered in raw canvas purchased at the D.C. Wisconsin Avenue Container Store. I'm not sure how long we will continue to use these (they came over in our air shipment) but they have been nice in the short run. To put the next paragraph in visual context, the garment racks are over 6' tall.
You can see the 14 foot ceilings of a pre-air conditioned house, ceiling fan in place (sadly not one of the pre-war art deco French versions that look like something Daisy Buchanan would have used to make sure she never perspired). Not in this picture, but just off to the left, is the air conditioner outlet that lets us sleep in comfort.
So we have bought enough furniture locally to get by. This first photo is our bedroom. In it you can see our truly amazing Cambodian bed, which is estimated to be somewhere between 75-125 years old. While it is hard to tell from this photo it is composed of two mahogany planks, each 30 inches wide and about 1.5 inches thick, laid across two mahogany feet. To truly appreciate this I would have you go down to your local lumber dealer and ask him for a piece of immaculate mahogany 7 feet long, 30" wide, and 1 1/2 inches thick. After they stop laughing you'll begin to appreciate this bed.
The bed is tastefully accented by the steel garment racks covered in raw canvas purchased at the D.C. Wisconsin Avenue Container Store. I'm not sure how long we will continue to use these (they came over in our air shipment) but they have been nice in the short run. To put the next paragraph in visual context, the garment racks are over 6' tall.
You can see the 14 foot ceilings of a pre-air conditioned house, ceiling fan in place (sadly not one of the pre-war art deco French versions that look like something Daisy Buchanan would have used to make sure she never perspired). Not in this picture, but just off to the left, is the air conditioner outlet that lets us sleep in comfort.
5 Living in tropical climates you learn a lot about thermodynamics. The first days I was sleeping in this room (Kathy was in Kenya visiting Stefan) I put on the air conditioner and the fan. And the temperature in the room never dropped below 84 degrees Fahrenheit. Then one day I forgot to turn on the fan while I was downstairs having dinner, and when I walked into the room it was 76 degrees. It turns out (duh!) that cold air stays in the bottom of the room and hot air rises, and by putting on the fan I was mixing them, and raising the overall temperature significantly.
All of this makes me look amazingly anal retentive unless you realize that, by chance, the travel alarm clock I use has a thermometer on it. Also, 84 degrees with the breeze from the fan and 76 degrees without the breeze feel about the same. Not sure where that leaves me.
This next photo is looking towards the bottom of the stairs (the bedroom is upstairs). We bought a patio table which will soon move move outside to the patio, but in the meantime is serving as our dining room table. This section of the house has no air conditioning, the window to the right is wide open (screened) to the elements. There is both an overhead fan for normal days and a large circular fan (bottom right of the picture) for hot days to keep us cool while we eat.
This next photo is of our main downstairs room, which will eventually (see customs clearance above) have the formal dining table and our living room furniture. It runs the whole length of the house and opens out on to a small, raised front patio. I may be odd but when I stand in it I just feel like I need to have a gin and tonic in my hand to complete the picture. You can see that we have bought one rattan lounger, which I thought would eventually end up outside on the patio, but which Kathy has decided will be our television watching seating (our television to be is in our shipment caught up in customs). It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if this last vision is true we will need a second rattan lounge chair, and it won't surprise those of you who know us well that a second is on order from the Indonesian furniture store that sold us the first lounge.
This last photo is a close up of our tiled floor. As you can see it is pretty ornate. I tried to explain this to Kathy when we were back in Luray packing up to come here, but nonetheless we have 9 Persian and Moroccan rugs on their way here. It is going to be interesting to see how many are actually used, Kathy seems pretty insistent that we put some down, I am having trouble picturing the clashing patterns. We'll keep you, dearest readers, posted.
Next, the outside of the house.
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