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).
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.
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