Khmer New Year

It is Wednesday morning, the middle day of the 3-day Khmer New Year, and Kathy and I are in my office taking advantage of the internet (our home internet is acting particularly weird), and I thought I'd mention a word or two about the Khmer New Year. Or in this case, copy from a site called ethnomed.org:

Usually, Khmer New Year is celebrated for three days:

The first day of New Year is called as Moha Sangkran, and it can be described simply as the inauguration of the New Angels who come to take care the world for a one-year period. This year is the year of Snake (Msanh), and Moha Sangkran of the New Year will begin on April 13th at 11: 36 PM. The leader of Angels is named KimiteaTevi. People need to clean and decorate the house and also prepare fruits and drinks for the New Year inauguration and to welcome the New Angels at every single home. Elderly people like to meditate or pray the Dharma at that time because they believe that any angel who comes to their houses at that time will stay with them and take care of their family for the whole year. Actually, in the morning at the first day of New Year, most Khmer people prepare food to offer the monks at Khmer temple to get blessed. It is a great time for boys and girls to play traditional games together at the temple or any field or playground in their village because it is only at the New Year time that boys and girls are allowed to play or to get together. Also it is a wonderful time for single people to search for the special partner to get married in the future. In the past 30 years, "Dating" did not exist in Cambodia.

The second day of New Year is called as Wanabot, which means day of offering gifts to the parents, grandparents and elders. Usually, Khmer People like to share gifts or presents to employees and also donate money or clothes to poor people. In the evening, people go to temple to build a mountain of sand and ask the monks to give them a blessing of happiness and peace.

The third day is called as day of "Leung Sakk;" that means the year starts to be counted up from this day, for example it is when the year of 2000 would change and begin to be 2001. Traditionally, in the morning, we used to go to the temple to perform the ceremony of the mountain of sand to get blessed. In the evening, to complete the New Year festival, our Khmer people need to perform the last ceremony, called as "Pithi Srang Preah", which means giving a special bath or a special shower to Buddha statues, the monks, elders, parents, grand parents to apologize for any mistake we have done to them and to gratify them. Every one must have a wonderful time during this ceremony because it is a great opportunity for every one, young and old, man and woman to have much fun by spreading out water to each other.

You can also read more at :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_New_Year


The most striking thing so far is that Phnom Penh almost completely clears out. I mean, completely. It makes August in Paris look overrun with Frenchmen. I'd say traffic is down by 90%. Apparently everyone who does stay in Phnom Penh (those who were born here and have family here, presumably) goes to Wat Phnom in the evening, so we ran into a little traffic jam there yesterday evening, but otherwise you can just sail around on the boulevards, where traffic normally averages maybe 15 mph.

The Outside of Our House (and a Vespa to boot)

In the last post you saw what the inside of our house looked like, now you can see the outside. Put briefly, we live in a classic "Indochine" colonial house. For reasons I don't know, these houses and buildings were painted in a mustard yellow. They had wooden shutters of slightly brighter mustard yellow. There are relatively few of these houses left in Cambodia, mostly because the Khmer Rouge burned most of them down during their reign from 1975-1979 on the theory that anybody who lived in one was bourgeois. I'm guessing here, but there are probably less than 20-30 houses like ours left in Phnom Penh.

The KR were probably correct about the bourgeois elements living in such houses. The underlying question was whether society was better off without any bourgeois elements. As a fairly representative member of the bourgeoisie (the international bourgeoisie at that), my vote is no. My dimly-remembered 22 year old Marxist-infused self has trouble believing that I just wrote that, but there you go.

On a strange historical note, for some reason te French Colonial Administration in Vietnam taxed houses on the width of their property. Not surprisingly, this led to a lot of very deep, but not wide, houses. Many Vietnamese Colonial era houses have a courtyard in between two separate buildings, built front and back on a very slim plot to minimize taxes. The French Colonial Administration in Cambodia followed a different taxation policy, and thus Cambodia has relatively "normal" looking houses (absent Khmer Fouge destruction).

This first photo is looking at the back of our house up the garden side of the house (the other side is all driveway).

It isn't completely clear from this picture, but the house has the height of a 3 story house, but is only two stories high due to the 14 foot ceilings. The grass is watered during the dry season by a sprinkler system (the first that I have ever had). I am looking at this piece of land as the future site of a "plunge" pool, which is to say a simple small swimming pool into which one can immerse oneself at the end of a long hot day to unwind. We'll see.

This next photo is taken catty-corner from the last looking from the front of the house towards the back, on the driveway side of the house. One of my favorite parts of the house is the alcove jutting out from the main body of the house, this is where the dining area seen in the previous post is situated. You can also see the building off the back of the house, this houses both the kitchen (to the right), and 2 bedrooms and a bathroom (to the left). We'll probably use the bedrooms for our exercise equipment (the main house already has 3 bedrooms), but we'll see after all of our stuff gets delivered.

This next picture is taken from the other front corner, and shows the porch that comes off of the main living/dining room. The table that we are now using inside will move out to this porch, and I imagine that we will take many meals sitting outside-- assuming we come up with a way of providing air circulation. Come visit, and you, too, could be eating good French croissants on this porch as Phnom Penh comes to life on one morning....

This last photo is not of our house, it is of my Vespa, a mid-60s "150 Super". Cambodia is not the old Vespa nirvana that Vietnam is, but there are still some around, almost all owned by sappy expatriates (a Honda Super Cub, which also dates back to the 50s, is much more fuel efficient and almost never breaks down, so defending the decision to drive a Vespa invariably returns to non-rational roots). In my case these non-rational roots come from my ownership of two different Vespas during mu college years, one of which (I kid you not) had its rear wheel come fully off when I was driving down Junipero Serra Blvd. at 45 mph at 3:00 AM one morning after my nightly bartending shift at the Dutch Goose. Yet, I continue to have a soft spot for Vespas. So we'll see. Given that You Tube has videos of people throwing Super Cubs off of 3 story buildings, and then going down to start them and drive off, and a Vespa will stop working if you look at it sideways, this may be a passing fancy, a midlife crisis, if you will, but I think we would all have to agree, if the extent of my midlife crisis is to buy an old Vespa,we're all in good shape. Let us all pray the same for the Vespa (Which is about 10 years younger than me, and they say 50 is the new 30...).

A Happy Khmer New Year to All.

The Inside of Our House

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.

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.

What Can I Say?

I'm a bad blogger. Good bloggers manage to post 3 or more posts a week, no matter what. That way beloved blog readers keep checking in to read the posts. I, on the other hand, go months at a time without posting anything. Leading beloved readers to wander off to whatever corners of the internet keeps them interested.

In my defense I could say that I have been busy. Even very busy. That I spend an unbelievable amount of my time going to meetings in which I have no desire to participate. But that as a distinguished, senior public health professional I have to go to such meetings, or risk embarrassment to all that I hold dear (that is, more or less, the way it has been explained to me).

Maybe I have to figure out a way to write blog posts while I am being bored out of my mind at said meetings.

Anyway, it is Sunday afternoon in the week leading up to the Khmer New Year (Tuesday-Thursday), which has about the same effect on Cambodian life that Christmas week does on American life, so no more meetings for a little while, and time to post, so after the drought...

the monsoon....

See, that was a S.E. Asian reference, no monsoons to be had in Virginia or Maryland. Maybe there is a reason for you all to check in to this website every once in a while. Or maybe sign up for the RSS feed, that way the intertubes will tell you when I have managed to post something and you won't waste your time checking in.

P.S. As another free hint, if you double click on the photos they get bigger, showing you more detail of the documentation of our exotic lives. No photos in this post, but more coming at you soon.