After Thailand Cambodia was very different in terms of organisation, infrastructures. We arrived in the countryside which reminded us so much of some places we went because of the garbage all over the place and burned and the animals walked freely in the villages. In terms of landscape, Cambodia is a flat country with paddy fields, scattered coconut trees and Khmer houses and lots of rivers. Travelling through the country is quite monotonous! The road system is quite simple: all the roads go to and through Phom Penh. B O P H A N A What about history? Cambodia still needs some time to recover from colonialism (French colony: 1863-1953), imperialism (Cambodian Civil war 1970), dictatorship (Pol Pot regime 1975-1979) and Vietnamese invasion (1979-1989). Since 1992 Khmer people came back to their country and tried to start from scratch. To learn about the history, we went to Bophana Audiovisual Resource center. (www.bophana.org). Rithy Pahn a filmmaker and founder of the centre collects images about the Cambodian history. It took 10 years to convince authorities to open the centre. We watched documentaries, films, news especially about 1970 – 1975 and after 1992. It turned to be my second cinema in PP, I spent hours there even though it is not an easy cinema. It was about the Khmer genocide and Pol Pot regime, killing, starvation, the destiny of families or people who died or survived the regime and the trials in 2009. Bophana: Love in the Time of the Khmer Rouge http://bophana.org/boutique/1284-2/ Duch, Master of the forges of Hell (2012) http://bophana.org/boutique/duch-master-of-the-forges-of-hell-2012/ S21, the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2002) http://bophana.org/boutique/s21-the-khmer-rouge-killing-machine-2002/ After each session, once outside the centre, I looked at people old enough to have lived in 1975 and wondered what they did during that time: which side were they 40 year ago? It was a strange feeling. Life style People adults as well as kids work hard and long hours, they always have a closed face. It was not easy to have them smile. If you meet a person several times and also make some efforts to speak Khmer, the attitude will change. It takes time. We managed to eat all the time at the same places or buy at the local markets some coconut cakes, the vendors welcomed us differently after a while. Hammocks are very present in a Khmer daily life, they hang everywhere where it can be fixed. It replaces cradles, chairs or bed at night especially for tuk-tuk drivers. A tuk-tuk serves as bedroom, a bit more comfortable than a motorbike. A funny things are the bike for kids. It seems to us that families buy one bike for one child for their whole life or there is only one bike for the family and kids ride it even it four times bigger than them! Eating habits: it is very easy: Cambodians eat constantly, it is maybe a hobby! They do have two hours break for lunch! 7am local restaurants are full and people eat a portion of rice with meat or soup. They eat everything spiders, worms and any kinds of bugs. They do have sweets such as coconut cakes, pumpkin, croissants and baked stuffs, most of them shapes are different but things taste the same! We are experts as we tried everything from a bakery!!! Generations live under the same roof, in a small room or flat in the city. Unfortunately we did not succeed of finding a volunteering job in the countryside without being asked to pay at least 6USD a day per person! What Khmers love as most of the South East Asian country is karaoke. We had the opportunity to go but we did not sing... Cambodians who were with us, were really talented!! It was a fun night! We had the chance to immersed three weeks in the capital life while working in a cinema owned by a British expat. During the day we explored the city during the day and we adapted to the busy city life style after spending two and a half weeks in quiet place Otres beach 2! Our job was dead easy pressing the start button to play the movies and to cuddl the cat Eddy! What was more complicated was to cope with the management and the Khmer employee. At the end everything went well and we enjoyed one or two films per day! We started our day with a nice breakfast either at the bakery round the corner or at the central market where we bought those delicious coconut cake! Then we watched a movie or did some sightseeing (palace, S21). We had to be back for our shift, 3 hours of work per day and on weekends a bit longer. From where we lived we had a good observation point at any time of the day. Most of the scenes occurs on the pavement! Street 130, 34 – We were not in the most touristic street during daytime but evenings! On the left side Morning next door men gather to chat and drink Mekong wine accompanied with dried fish. Only Önder was invited and he accepted once but at the end he had to pay!!! LOL Lunchtime is like in France from 12 to 2pm: almost everything is closed and people have a lunchbreak. Nothing happens until 2 or 3pm. Afternoon: the drinkers of the early morning left the place. Around 2pm a couple installed a couple of tables and chair and sold some fried food tasty and spicy! Evening: Around 6pm the couple finish work and the drinkers went back for 2 hours. In front of the cinema and next door (right side): a motorbike shop surrounded with bar girls. After three weeks, I could have contacts with our neighbours (right hand side), mostly smile, greetings as they do not speak English. They start their day at 4pm (make up and eating) and depending on the day stay longer outside if there was no customer. They look very young and we really want to communicate more, we had to face a language barrier. At night the streets were not that empty as some people sleep in the street either on motorbikes or in hammock such as tuk tuk drivers, kids begging for money and sniffing glue, people collecting carton boxes or cans have to sleep on the floor, they cannot even afford a hammock, motorbike shops who cannot closed so vendors installed their beds in the street in the middle of their bikes etc and of course tourists… Later at night streets were quieter and the girls next door sometimes were crying in silence with their teddy bears in their arms. During three weeks it was our daily life, it was like a theatre and we soaked up in the atmosphere of the Street 130. We recommend the German movie "Same same but different" based on a true story. The action takes place in Phom Penh and it deals with a German guy who travels in Cambodia..
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