genocide haiku

I’ve yet to write successfully about Cambodia, a subject which extends far beyond the country’s horrors but never, for me at least, out of their sight.  Here’s my latest attempt, with the photograph, from our visit to Tuol Sleng in July, that prompted it.   The former high school’s first floor is filled, room after room [...]

Newshounds

For those reporters out there (and anyone who still reads newspapers), here’s the entrance to the International Herald Tribune’s Singapore bureau, on Club Street, in a part of the city state that hasn’t been torn down amd built back up.

And here’s the mansion headquarters in Phnom Penh of the Cambodian Daily, where, naturally, I went [...]

Public Notice

I took a picture of this graffiti (on the wall of an official looking compound in Phnom Penh) wondering what it said.  Turns out it’s a government posted notice, according to our Tuk Tuk driver Johnny, who told me it meant, in his words, “No pissing.”
  

Open House

One of the things I’ve been wondering about is why scenes like this
draw me so much, make me grab for my camera.  There’s nothing intrinsically interesting in this transaction, in an herb shop in Hanoi’s old quarter, or especially different from a transaction witnessed in a mall or on a busy shopping street at home [...]

Crunchy, a bit bzzzzzy

In case you didn’t believe me, or were trying to forget about it, here’s the plate of bees and ants I ate at a small place on 13 Street not far from the riverfront.  KK and I, in retrospect, came to believe that it was a semi-underground gay scooter bar, noeither equipped nor prepared for dining [...]

And we’re off

to Saigon, first by a fast boat on the Mekong (light a joss stick for us to make it!) and then by bus from Chau Doc to what is officially named but very rarely called Ho Chi Minh CIty.
We’ll update from there, and fill in some details about Phnom Penh.  SUffice for now to say [...]

Economic indicators and other odds and ends

A street leading away from the Central Market.
IN Cambodia, one of the world’s poorer developing countries, restaurants place boxes of tissues on their tables, in contrast to far, far wealthier Singapore, where one has to be carry your own napkins.
We ate today at a place called Frizz,  owned by a Dutchman who moved here to open [...]

The Langston effect

This picture doesn’t show it really, but it’s the most remarkable thing traveling with Langston and seeing how people react to him here.  This woman, in one of the aisles in Phnom Penh’s jampacked, labrynthine Central Market, reached out and grabbed him as he walked by.  Cooing and touching him andcupping his face and kissing him.  Not in [...]

I ate…

Pictures will follow to prove it — but tonight at dinner I (accidentally) ordered fried beef with ants.   KK told me, but I disagreed, that my inquiry about a particular menu item had, in fact, been taken as an order.  She was, as she generally is, correct.  The first dish to arrive was fried beef [...]

Catching up to photos

 Phnom Penh is a chaotic, often surreal place, a fever dream of toil and turmoil, weariness and illusions, of grabbing uncertainly but desperately for strands of a more certain future always on the brink of vanishing, a place where forgetting collides with remembering.  To me, it seethes today with striving and daily struggle, is a place tearing itself from the [...]