Getting Around in Phnom Penh

In any international or cross cultural situation there are bound to be areas of adjustment. Going to a country as different from my own as Cambodia, there are lots of adjustments to be made.

In the US we have lots of numbered streets. How would anyone in Philadelphia find Tenth Church, for example without Seventeenth Street? In New York you find your way uptown and downtown by the numbered streets and across town by numbered avenues. Here every street seems to have a number. I'm staying on street 460 for example, in the southern part of town. It's accessed by street 123, which is the nearest cross street. And the numbers keep going up. I don't know where they stop. By the way I'm staying in the neighborhood of the Russian Market, a huge indoor market where they sell a little of everything: clothing, knock off designer fashions, fabric and other dry goods like towels and sheets, artistic and craft productions, wathces and jewelry. And you need to bargain for a good price. They figure that foreigners are rich and so they try to charge us more.

A surprising number of streets are not paved, although friends who have been here for some years tell me that it's much better than it used to be. Therefore, dust is a way of life. It's everywhere! People who ride motorbikes, the preferred means of transportation, since gas costs $4.60 a gallon, (quite a bite out of the family budget when you consider that a teacher's salary is only about $25 a month!) anyway, people who ride on motorbikes tend to wear a surgical mask or some other means of covering their nose and mouth so that they minimize the amount of dust that they breathe. By the way, I went to church on the back of a motorbike yesterday. One of the students who hangs out at the Friendship Club graciously took me.

One of the other great adjustments is stairs. I don't think they have a buildilng code that regulates the size and steepness of steps. When they have a given space in which to build stairs, they make the steps as steep as necessary to get from one end of the staircase to the other. Consequently, the bottom step may require a bit of a giant step. After the first time you come down the steps and realize how long the last step is, you take it gently!

As in Europe, light switches work the opposite from American ones. Generally we push the switch up for "on" and down for "off". here it's the opposite. Consequently I think I push away at light switches more than people who know what they are doing. By the time I leave here I may even have it all figured out!