More snapshots of life in Cambodia

When I saw "morning glory" listed on the menu I imagined it to be a dish of flowers. After all, in Italy we breaded and fried zucchini flowers, why shouldn't they serve morning glories? Finally I got the chance to have some, but there were no flowers and no vines. Here, morning glory is the name of a swamp grass--the kind that grows in ditches at the side of the road--and often it is braised and served with oyster sauce or served in soup. It isn't bad unless you try to imagine how much sewage your serving might have absorbed. It is after all, a green vegetable, and I expect that it contains at least some vitamins.

Before I came to Cambodia I expected that everyone would drink tea. After all, this is Asia. What a surprise to realize that the national drink is coffee, which is grown here. Coffee here is served with generous helpings of condensed milk, which both whitens and sweetens it. Since this is a tropical climate, cold drinks are very much in order. Iced coffee is served with a thick layer of condensed milk at the bottom of the glass--perhaps a quarter to a third of the glass--before the coffee is poured in over it to make a striped looking beverage, which is rather attractive to look at.

Why would anyone put the legs of kitchen furniture into bowls of water? It looks rather strange. But it is a very effective way of keeping crawling insects from getting into the stuff stored in that furniture!

Road crews have been paving some dirt streets in my neighborhood. It's a very labor-intensive, low-tech operation. They do send in machinery to level the roadbed. The rest is done by hand. First of all, they dump loads of rock on the levelled roadbed, and crews of women come in and spread the rocks out in a reasonably even level. Then they dump loads of sand, which the next crew loads up into wheelbarrows and dumps on top of the rocks. The other day as I watched a crew do this on a nearby street I was deeply saddened to see young boys, who looked to be about 10 or 12 years old, pushing and dumping the wheelbarrow of sand. I don't know if they use child labor on every street that gets paved, but seeing it even once is heartbreaking. Then they bring in a portable cement mixer, which is placed at the head of the street, and laborers shovel cement, sand and gravel into it and let it mix. The mixed concrete is shoveled into a wheelbarrow, wheeled down the street and dumped over a latticed frame of bamboo, where it is spread out by hand and becomes the paved road. At home, where labor is more expensive, they would just drive up in a huge cement mixer truck and dump the contents on the street for the road crews to spread out evenly.