Danny's Weblog

2007 Jul 06 [ Fri ]

My girlfriend gets her last wisdom tooth removed

For the past couple of years, she's had recurring problems with her wisdom teeth. Really, they had all grown in badly and needed to be removed, but of course it's quite a gruelling procedure at the best of times, and she found that she was in a lot of distress for a week or more after a single one was removed. So she put off handling each one as long as possible.

This week she got the final one done. The price was 15 USD; the procedure was fairly short and she seemed OK afterwards.

I had asked her to get a prescription for a sore on her tongue too; I observed that what she was prescribed was an antibiotic (amoxycillin), although a few days previously when we had asked at a pharmacy, the pharmacist gave her an anti-fungal cream (candida). She had been upset when I questioned the pahrmacist; all I wanted to know was why he thought it was candida when he never examined her mouth. Actually, I also wanted to point out that the preparation did nothing for the pain, which was her main complaint.

She was also prescribed ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory, plus Efferalgan, a big fizzy tablet like an Alka-Seltzer containing paracetamol and codeine, for pain relief. Hmm, isn't ibuprofen the same thing as paracetamol? and isn't paracetamol very close to overdose in normal use?

The total price of the drugs was 7 USD. I bought them at a separate pharmacy (next to Lucky's on Sihanouk – recommended).

She felt well enough the next day to go to university and then to work, but continued to have pain, and when she had to attend a "briefing" (when she needed to sleep after her night shift!) her manager told her to go to the company clinic. They prescribed 5 different sets of pills, with no piece of paper to say who prescribed them, what they were for or how to take them, just a couple of scrawled lines on the plastic bags they came in. They also gave her an injection, but she doesn't know what it was. T said the price of all this was 20 USD, although the company was paying.

The company clinic appears to be some sort of ripoff. I urged her to check what they had prescribed with her dentist, but she was reluctant.

She's still in a lot of discomfort, and has to take the Efferalgan (codeine) several times a day, which is not really good for her (I doubt it improves her balance on a motorbike, for instance).

Overall I think her outcome is about the same here as it might have been in a developed country. There's a chance that the initial removal might be done more skilfully, or with better follow-up (I was surprised that no follow-up appointment is made to check healing), but a western country might well have made it impossible to get codeine, which really works.

2007 Jul 04 [ Wed ]

Fedex shipment to Cambodia

Because regular (hah!) mail service in Cambodia is so poor, I recently arranged for some mail to be sent from the US via FedEx.

To avoid delivery problems (I certainly didn't want someone in the landlord's family to sign for it) I requested that the package should be held at the FedEx office on Monivong for me to pick it up. I also gave my phone number to be on the package so they could call me.

Well, they didn't call me, but I could see via FedEx's web interface that the package had arrived, so I went over to pick it up.

Happily it was there and in good shape (and had not been delivered next door, as had apparently happened last time when they delivered it to 701C instead of 701D Monivong) and I was happy.

The girl however wanted me to fill out the receipt form properly. "Can you write down your phone number please?" I don't have it memorized and started to punch buttons on my cellphone. She smiled and took pity on me. "Look, it's right here on the package."

She didn't ask to see any ID whatsoever. In other words, anyone knowing the waybill number could have picked it up. Hmmm.

2007 May 17 [ Thu ]

Solution to the Cambodian kramaa-pyjamas problem

As soon as I came to Thailand I became aware that the Thais all wear pajamas, or some similar nightwear, to sleep. This seems very strange to the foreigner who is unbearably hot when naked.

I wrote it off to prudery, although when I questioned people about it they said they felt more comfortable with pajamas.

Having slept without AC for a couple of years I have somewhat acclimatized, and believe I now understand the issue. It is basically caused by a shortcoming in the body's sweat control system.

If the skin is in effect enclosed – for instance, when you lie on your back – the local skin does not detect that it is completely saturated already and it might as well *stop* sweating. Instead, it goes into overdrive! Quite rapidly the supply of sweat is largely exhausted and you get the worst of both worlds: a saturated puddle of bedclothes beneath the sleeper, chafing against raw, dried-out skin.

I now realize that pajamas bypass this problem. As soon as the part of the pajama against the bed starts to saturate, the sleeper rolls over, exposing that part to the air and allowing the sweat to dissipate (although the salts and oils may remain, I believe as stated in previous postings on acclimatization that these constituents of sweat are minor in Asians). Thus the sheet *beneath* the sleeper does not saturate.

In the event that the sleeper is not wearing nightwear, he will respond by curling the entire top sheet around himself so that he can use it for the same purpose. I had noticed this peculiar behavior on many occasions (having woken up without any sheet at all around me and wondered why). I don't know what happens when two pajamaless Asians have to share a single sheet! It also occurs when the room is air-conditioned, but of course the observer assumes in that case that the sleeper is simply trying to keep warm.

There is a similar basic problem which the "kramaa", the brightly-patterned scarf so characteristic of Cambodia, can solve. It is this: unless you gaze quite horizontally, the skin tends to fold at the neck. Where the skin folds together, the sweat cannot evaporate. For some reason I never focused on this issue in Thailand, but certainly in Cambodia I have noticed that if I am looking down – reading, for instance, or even watching TV – within a few minutes the skin becomes sweaty and irritated at my neck. Of course, the kramaa can easily be used to disperse this sweat as soon as it accumulates.

A separate issue which affects pajamas is mosquitoes. For some reason mosquitoes seem to prefer to attack the calves, even when one is lying down. Pajamas, like trousers, seem to largely foil mosquitoes. (You would think they wouldn't make much difference but they do.)

2007 Jan 24 [ Wed ]

Young boy squirts enema on Cambodian TV

I've written a couple of reviews of Cambodian movies and seen several more in which little boys' weenies were shown on screen, so I was used to Cambodians' laid-back attitudes on such things.

However I was not prepared for what I saw last night on Channel 11, around 2215 in their regular show "Niatii Pteah Lek Dop Muay". An interviewer was chatting to a crowd of young people in some village, and encouraged one of them to exhibit his party trick.

The young boy – apparently perhaps eight years old, although it's hard for a Westerner to determine the age of Asians (your honor) – proceeded to take off all his clothes (on camera) and squat in a large basin of muddy water, earnestly grimacing for a long time while the interviewer filled in with banter. At length the boy rose from the basin and bent forward, and with some effort squirted long jets of water from his rear.

At this point the camera was somewhat in front of the boy so it did not show his bottom clearly, but there was no sign that the "performance" was faked; after several repetitions the crowd responded with warm applause.

Many sources refer rather vaguely to the Cambodians' "earthy" sense of humor; now I can cite this example.

2007 Jan 06 [ Sat ]

Possible answer to the Cambodian yuon (Vietnamese) issue

When you first learn about Cambodia, it doesn't seem so surprising that many Cambodians hate the Vietnamese. Cambodia has been losing territory and its self-respect to the Vietnamese and Thais for centuries.

But then you figure out that Hun Sen was installed and propped up by the Vietnamese government and continues to take their orders. So it seems pretty odd that the government continually whips up anti-Vietnamese hysteria.

Now it's true that the Vietnamese government does not exactly have the interests of the Vietnamese people as its highest priority – it's kinda like the King of the Roaches in the "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Fat Freddy's Cat" strip who was always sending off more roaches to be eaten by the cat.

On the other hand, what does it actually *want*?

Another thing that slowly sinks in is is that most of South Vietnam, from Siagon to the coast, was Cambodia until recently, when it was grabbed by the Vietnamese under an agreement with the French. So a lot of the Vietnamese one sees in Phnom Penh are not hardline NVA cadres, they're the descendants of families who may have considerable loyalty to the Khmer people. (The area is known as Kampuchea Krom.)

Hmm. What may be the answer is contained in a book I was reading about folk tales of Kampuchea Krom. The editor happened to mention that most people in South Vietnam do not even speak Vietnamese.

This makes everything clear. I had assumed that one meets so many desperate Vietnamese in Phnom Penh because their families had been labelled as bourgeois after the collapse of South Vietnam, but it seemed strange that this would live on for 30 years. But if you accept that the Vietnamese government sees most of the people of South Vietnam as despised, expendable Cambodians instead of fellow Vietnamese, it makes sense.

When you travel in South Vietnam you see prosperity and bustle, and you think "why on earth do so many of them struggle to reach Cambodia?". Well, the ones that do are second-class citizens or worse, living under a colonialist yoke.

The government of Vietnam must enjoy many a hearty chuckle at the success of its plan to make the Khmer people kill each other, while it siphons all the aid that the West sends out of the country to make sure it continues to qualify for more aid...

en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Krom]

2006 Oct 13 [ Fri ]

Update on wet bathrooms and flipflops

A year or two back I wrote a little article pointing out that if you buy a few extra pairs of flipflops you can make do with the typical Asian-style wet bathrooms: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Miscellaneous/wetbathrooms01.html]

Since then I've revised my thinking somewhat. I used to suggest four pairs. I've now decided that trying to dry them in the sun is probably a mistake; either that or the bleach I was using also seems to corrode the surfaces of the shoe and create even more unsightly mold in the long run.

Now I basically have just two pairs of flipflops. I wear one pair and keep the other pair just outside the bathroom door. When I go in to shower, I wear the current pair, and when I finish the shower I dry my feet (with a separate small towel) and put on the pair outside the door, leaving the wet pair to get dry, ie alternating the roles.

Showering while wearing the flipflops seems sufficient to avoid the buildup of grime, and the time between showers seems sufficient to allow them to dry. It's really easy and the only problem is getting the maid not to take your spare pair.

It's good to keep another pair for moving around just outside the apartment.

2006 Sep 09 [ Sat ]

Losing your privacy by giving out your business card

In Slashdot today I found a discussion about a company called "Jigsaw" which invites people to enter all the business cards they've collected so that it can build up a big database of business people's contact information: yro.slashdot.org [http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/08/0049259]

Obviously most posters made the point that although you may give out your card to many people you probably don't know, that does not mean that you wish the information on the card to be truly public.

By coincidence, my girlfriend had a privacy problem with her business card recently. She's started working at a new location in her company, and her new boss decided everybody had to get business cards. When she got hers I noticed they had her *personal* cellphone number: everybody she gave her card to would be able to harrass her.

After stewing about it for a while I took the cards to a design shop on Sihanouk and had them make copies that don't show the phone number.

2006 Jul 21 [ Fri ]

The state of mail delivery in Phnom Penh

For a long time I was under the impression that Phnom Penh had no functioning mail delivery to individual locations at all, but recently I saw someone on the khmer440 board say that he gets stuff delivered to his home all the time.

I still wouldn't advise it. Last year, having heard that delivery to a box at the Phnom Penh Post Office was relatively reliable, I tried it. A package was sent from the USA postmarked 2005-11-16, and I just received it today.

To be fair to the post office, there were three reminders about the package in my box dating back to 2006-03-23. I had given up checking for the package some while before that however; when I complained the guy in the post office only said "well it might have gone to Colombia".

There was a big hole in the package and someone had put the gold foil wrapper from a chocolate coin inside, in fragments. There was an illegible postmark stamped on the back, but no other notification that the package had been opened officially. Far from apologizing for the delay, the post office demanded 2000 R for storing it.

I don't care what anyone else says. The Cambodian postal service is a shambles run by and for crooks.

...On second thoughts, I suppose it's entirely possible these days that the package was opened by the US secret police rather than Cambodian thieves. Still, you might think the guy on the counter would at least apologize when a package shows up months late and obviously tampered with.

2006 Jun 08 [ Thu ]

Now photographs of the funny gun at Central Market, Phnom Penh

A couple of weeks ago I noted that I had seen an unusual submachinegun at the Central Market, apparently a silenced model as used by US Special Forces in the Vietnam era. www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Miscellaneous/funnygun01.html]

Recently I dragged my girlfriend to the location where I had seen the gun. I found it again and she persuaded the person wielding it to let me take some photographs.

He did not want to be photographed himself but he did say what he knew about the gun. He said it had been issued to him by the government (he was wearing an OD uniform with I think a police badge) and that it was one of a batch of guns that the government had recently acquired. I have the impression that I have seen more than one guy at the location with the same sort of gun.

For the purpose of the photographs he considerately took off a sort of bandage that had been wrapped around it. I did not think of asking him about it at the time, but now it occurs to me that it might have been necessary to hold the magazine catch closed because the magazine being used is not really designed for the weapon.

The view below shows the folding stock. A serial number is visible but there is no manufacturer's name that I can see.

Now that I can compare the photos with the references on the web I am much less certain that this is a Carl Gustav M/45. For instance the selective fire control is on the right of this gun with 3 positions, but on the left of the M/45 with two. It may be a Smith & Wesson M76, but I could not find a picture (did you know there was an M76 nebula? I sure know now). Still, any silenced weapon has got to have a few tales to tell.

2006 May 26 [ Fri ]

An interesting gun seen at Central Market

For the benefit of those who live outside Cambodia, I should probably explain that the Central Market area of Phnom Penh has many gold and jewelry stores, and most of them have a guard outside (sometimes more than one) carrying some sort of firearm. Typically this is some variety of AK47 of course, as these are the cheapest available, but you also see K54 and K59 handguns.

As I was sidling along the west side of the market square this afternoon however I saw a weapon that made me do a doubletake. It was a submachinegun with an integral silencer! It had a plain tubular look, with a bright orange plastic handgrip sculpted for the thumb which made it look a bit like an air pistol. It had a folding stock and a curved magazine. I had a vague idea I'd seen it before but couldn't remember where. It had a *telescopic sight*!

I tried to ask the guard if I could take a picture, but he seemed to not understand Cambodian – at least not my variety. I wonder if he knows how much a nostalgia item like this is worth?

Searching on the web makes me think it's probably the Swedish Carl Gustaf K-pist m/45: www.nazarian.no [http://www.nazarian.no/wep.asp?id=382&group_id=4&country_id=67&lang=0&p=5]

Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustaf_M/45]

None of the pages I saw about the m/45 referred to a curved magazine, but if this thing has hung around South-East Asia since 1973 it's probably had several blacksmith repairs. I'd be surprised if the silencer wasn't burnt out by now: it probably has no accuracy.

2006 May 02 [ Tue ]

Some ideas about architecture in Phnom Penh

1. My initial impression – when I came here from Thailand – was that the Cambodians were much more sensible about building design than the Thais, who delight in building cramped, stuffy concrete boxes to live in.

After a while however I have realized that buildings looked better than in Thailand because the Cambodians did not have enough money to replace them. New buildings are almost always in the Thai style, with only some bright, cheerful color detailing and opulent stainless-steel balconies to distract from the cellblock design.

2. I have been thinking about how to present my ideas for a long time. A few days ago I built up an illustration in Corel Draw, only to discover that the appearance was much the same as existing buildings. This was actually one of my goals – I didn't want to suggest something that would appear bizarre to the Cambodians – but it makes an illustration that just gives an overview a little pointless.

3. I am considering redoing the illo in some 3D format so that I can more easily point out details. I vaguely remember that several years ago there was a Java applet that allowed any browser client to rotate a 3-D object in three dimensions. Maybe I can find it again.

4. My general goals are: -1. Comfort without having to use AC -2. Dust control -3. Security -4. Noise and smell handling -5. Extendability

5. The last point relates to something the Cambodians are used to in their current buildings: as a building owner becomes more prosperous he adds storeys. In some ways the result is charming, although one wonders if the resulting building is really within spec. In particular, the practice makes it really difficult to install elevators, which causes most apartments in Phnom Penh above the first floor (E1) to be impractical for the middle-aged (ie me).

6. Another aspect of extendability is parking. The Cambodians seem determined to recapitulate all the mistakes of every other society in urban design. Right now, the only practical way to provide parking is to leave much of the ground floor unused during the day so that the family car can be parked there at night (or possibly the car of a neighbor who needs to rent a space). This seems extremely wasteful of dwelling space as well as suboptimal for the driver (most dwellings are so narrow it is possible to get out of the parked car on only one side, and then only by contortion). I have some ideas for designs which will have options both for a "high-GNP" scenario where every middle-class family gets a car, and for "Dutch green" scenarios where ICE vehicles are banned from city centers (guess which I favor).

2006 Apr 08 [ Sat ]

Absolutely horrible hygiene is not actually common in Phnom Penh

A few days ago I was walking down Street 63 about 500 m from Soraya Mall when I noticed a woman stop and examine a puddle in the street. I was wondering why when she squatted down and hitched up her skirt. Corblimey, I thought, she's going to pee right in the street.

To my horror, however, she actually put her fingers in the water and flicked up the water into her crotch, apparently to clean it or cool it – a literal example of "freshening up" I suppose.

She was about 45 years old, tall, wearing bright-colored mismatched clothes suggesting that she was a country person. I thought perhaps puddles in the countryside contain water which is about as clean as the water in the streams, but of course a puddle in the city is a toxic waste dump.

When I mentioned this occurrence to my girlfriend she found it hard to believe. She said she had never heard of anyone doing such a thing. Presumably the woman was demented.

It reminds me of something that happened to me when I was living in Munich thirty years ago. I went to Berlin for a convention, and decided to check out East Berlin one afternoon. Recall that East Berlin was under communist control at the time. I had never gone there before.

It was a Saturday, and I was surprised to find that not only were the shops closed (standard in West Germany too at that time) but also the bars and restaurants. About the only thing I could do was take the subway to look at different places.

At one stop I emerged from the subway entrance to find a young girl, perhaps thirteen years old, squatting *in front of* the bushes, in full view of anyone exiting the subway. I had never seen such a thing anywhere in the world. I did not know what to make of it, but I thought "OK, it means something about East Germany: maybe it means there aren't any public lavatories, or girls don't care about being seen peeing, or something".

Less than a week later I saw *the exact same thing* exiting the subway near my apartment. It could have been the same girl. I was stunned. It was like someone was telling me "don't leap to conclusions!".

2006 Mar 28 [ Tue ]

Continuing power cuts in Phnom Penh; generators and kludges

There was a story in the Cambodia Daily a while back that alleged that a new power station would come on line and relieve the power cuts by the end of February, but here it is the end of March and they continue.

I went to the length of assembling a switch box so that I could easily connect my battery-powered inverter to the entire house wiring, but having completed it it occurred to me that this inverter unit – probably like most such electronic units – produces a dirty output signal that kills fan motors. So each time a power cut occurred, before actually switching to the generator I would need to turn off not only the fridge (because it demands excessive power) but also all the fans. Visualize being in the dark and having to check all that. I day-dreamed about feeding the fans via relay-operated circuits that would trip out as soon as power was lost, but this is completely impractical here. I have only ever seen *one* type of relay on sale in *one* shop – running at 48 V DC!

So now my switch unit is just sitting there. I am considering wiring it up to one of the wall sockets that doesn't have any fans connected to it, but I really wanted to be able to supply the fluorescents in the rest of the apt. Oh well.

Incidentally, the inverter seems to work OK with fluorescents, including the miniaturized bulb-replacement type, my TV, DVD and laptop.

I've looked for a more professional-looking inverter, but I seem to have the spiffiest normally available, even though it lacks an on/off switch and a current meter. I've wondered about fitting the changeover switch (and the off switch) inside the case; if you switch to "charge" from "inverter" (once the city AC is back on) it continues to provide AC from the output socket (indeed so rapidly that the TV and DVD stay on) but it is not clear to me whether in this state the output socket has been switched directly to the AC in or whether the inverter is actually still running. Funnily enough, I have a gizmo I put together here which allows me to check the waveform on my laptop, but I haven't dug it out of my junkpile yet.

One thing the power cuts were good for was allowing me to fix my main AC input box. The knife switch was busted so that it only switched one wire. The other half of the switch had been jumpered over! The wires going into the box came from a kWh meter whose terminals were behind a sealed cover. For a long time I didn't dare touch it: even during a power cut, I didn't look forward to waving around two bare wires, which might suddenly get hot again at any moment. Then it occurred to me that I could use a chocolate block connector to easily terminate one of the wires at a time local to the original termination point, and then at my leisure wire up the chocolate block to the new switch. This worked very well, although I took great pains to map out what I had to do in advance so that nothing went wrong while I had hot wires to deal with. (Also, no power: if I had needed to drill holes to mount the chocolate block it would have been impossible.)

There were no specific fuses on the switch: instead, narrow-gauge stranded wire had been wired across it. I naively assumed some sort of cartridge fuse holder would be compatible, but the girl in the shop looked at me as if I was crazy and then showed me a roll of solder marked "20A"; apparently that's normal here. The human-interface aspect of replacing the fuse seems very poor: in order to access the fuse you have to move the switch handle halfway back to the on position. Also, it was hard to access the terminals to wire the "fuse wire" to them: the screws had to be unscrewed so far they tended to fall off and roll under the furniture. Furthermore, the cover was so hard to remove that I actually cracked it, even though I was only using my fingers, and I am not the Incredible Hulk. This might have been partly because the switch handle was in the way. There's now a hole in the cover, leaving the hot terminal accessible to the fingers. Sheesh.

Now that I can make the house wiring safe, I can easily do things like replace the ballast/starter in the fluorescents with an electronic starter. This worked well, except that the wires provided with the unit were too short to terminate to the fluorescent. I needed to use a lot of wirenuts (TM) and a jumper wire to wire the starter into the existing lamp assembly.

I was boasting to my girlfriend's brother about this, and he pointed out that the electronic inverters are very expensive: about twice the price of a complete lamp unit. On the other hand, a *regular* replacement ballast plus starter costs nearly as much as a new lamp unit.

He also said that the usual system for working on the main switch box for a house is to ask the landlord for the key to the electric company's box in the street, and turn off the power there. I was a little surprised by this as to casual inspection the boxes in the street (on lampposts etc) do not allow this, but maybe there's something I'm missing.

Generally, I'm struck by how much these power cuts must have cost Phnom Penh. I must have spent over a hundred dollars myself, plus a lot of time figuring things out and working on it. I see a lot of shops now, like the internet cafes, have a little petrol-powered generator that probably cost around 500 USD. I also see office buildings that have a car-sized generator that (guessing) must have cost them 10 000 USD.

Also, in my own case I'm probably using *more* power now: during a power cut almost the only thing I'm not using is the fridge, and it probably takes about as much energy to get the fridge back to normal temperature once the power returns as it would have to maintain the temperature. And of course there are losses in recharging the battery.

2006 Mar 12 [ Sun ]

My ghastly ants discovery

A while ago I bought an electric boiler pot to make hot tea. I soon started noticing ants in the water: I figured they were going in the spout to get the remaining drops of water, and got used to simply pouring off the antsy water until it ran clear.

Having been away for several days on a trip to Vietnam, I returned to find I suppose *hundreds* of drowned ants in the pot. As I (shudderingly) started to look at the pot, I realized there were a lot of non-dead ants running out of the hinge area.

I started trying to wash them away, but there were more and more. I decided I had to take a look (this was like that scene in Alien where the egg is lying in the cave and it starts going ga-blobble! ga-blobble! and the guy in the spacesuit bends down for a closer look and you scream DON'T DO IT YOU DOOFUS) and disassembled the top.

In the top of the boiler there's a surprisingly complex mechanism for pressurising the boiling chamber so that water is forced up and out the spout. At the heart is a plastic bellows. Inside were dozens of ants which had been squished by the walls of the bellows. In addition, there were many other miscellaneous corpses, plus I suppose more than a hundred just milling around.

Eventually we got it more or less clean (my girlfriend had been watching me, half commiserating and half laughing) but right now it's sitting in a bag, in pieces. I'm not sure I can put it together again, and I'm not sure I want to. Now I've seen the inside, it's evident that the blasted ants are going to be in there all the time, whether I see the corpses or not.

It's not clear to me how the pump works, but presumably the pump mechanism has to be forcing the air into the pot, so it occasionally sucks an ant into the pot as it does so.

It's also not clear to me why the ants seem so fascinated by the pump mechanism. I can understand why they'd crawl into the spout, and from there into the pot. Ants need a lot of water, and the dry season is started. But the pump mechanism? I can only guess that escaping steam condenses on the mechanism.

Now I wonder about similar units used in hotels and restaurants (even in the USA). I also wonder what happens in simple kettles.

2006 Feb 17 [ Fri ]

Ripoff at Kien Svay

Kien Svay is a lake about half an hour southeast of Phnom Penh. My girlfrend suggested we go there, so I brought her, some of her family, and a buddy, a few days ago. You can eat in nice little huts right on the water.

The web had warned me to look out for a mob of touts at the entrance to this area, so I asked my girlfriend to tell the driver to take care of it. There was only one tout, but unfortunately the driver seemed to know nothing about the area, so he did not give me any advice on which restaurant to choose.

We were also warned that the restaurants would charge exorbitant prices if we did not agree prices beforehand, so my gf was careful.

The dining experience was pleasant enough, although bearing in mind that the dishes are presumably washed in the lake water I ate nothing; neither did my buddy. We were initially brought sidewalk-drag ice, but my gf insisted on "teuk gork anamai".

We were surprised to be presented with a bill for 42 USD – for food for just 3 people, and a fair price would have been less than 14 USD. My girlfriend's checking prices was defeated by telling her a price for chicken and then billing for umpteen chickens (although we only ever saw one plate of chicken...). Similarly, we were charged 2 USD for Kleenex, which I have never been charged for anywhere before. And so on.

Here's a link to someone reporting essentially the same scam, which unfortunately I did not see in time: www-personal.umich.edu [http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ampage/AMPMLS/2-6/CAMBODIA.html] Search for "Traditional Khmei Head-Shaving" partway down the page. He rationalizes it with "well we had a fantastic time". Yeah, like the first 3 seconds after you leap from a rooftop thinking you could fly.

I was very angry but was warned repeatedly by my girlfriend that these people were gangsters and ready for a fight. Eventually she paid them with her own money.

I am surprised this scam is not better publicized. Even if you are aware of it and make efforts to avoid it, you are essentially robbed. My girlfriend says that if the place were busier (we were almost the only customers that day) they might not try it, but I cannot imagine anyone except perhaps Bruce Willis deliberately exposing himself to a robbery attempt.

My girlfriend says it was pointless to approach the police because they would take more money and probably do nothing.

I have the following suggestions that might be helpful:

1. Never go to Kien Svay and tell everyone you meet that they are thieves there. (Later my gf told me other Cambodian friends of hers had been victimized there and had paid up – they don't aim only at foreigners. Apparently you could insist on just paying the 5000R rental for the hut and nothing else, as people arrive on boats trying to sell you food, but then they would probably charge 50 USD for walkway rental.)

2. Take pictures of the restaurant facade and owner *as you enter* – they were not keen on me taking pictures after they unveiled the scam. (You need pictures of the facade to identify it later – none of the establishments have a name or a street address).

3. Check whether your cellphone has a good signal before you enter any such establishment. In theory you could call the tourist police in the event of a disagreement over the bill. I did not think of this while I was there. I do not know how long they would have taken to deal with it. There is a regular police station about 500 m east of the Monivong Bridge, ie about 15 mins drive away.

4. They did present an itemized bill. I did not think to retain it after my gf paid. I think it would be excellent evidence in the event it was actually possible to interest local cops.

2006 Feb 12 [ Sun ]

Some amusing stuff in travel guides to Cambodia

Although I've been living in Phnom Penh for a couple of years now, I haven't been adventurous at all. For instance, I'm thiunking of going to Kien Svay soon for the first time.

So I Googled it. The webpages I found naturally had some info about other places in Cambodia. I was particularly amused by this one: www.aseantravelandtours.com [http://www.aseantravelandtours.com/cambodia/sightseeings/phnompenh_surroundings.htm]

It calls Central Market "surprisingly cool, even in the heat of the hottest day". In my own experience a fairer description would be "surprisingly hot, even in the morning of the coolest days".

The other page: www.leisurecambodia.com [http://www.leisurecambodia.com/Leisure_Cambodia/No.23/placesOf_interest.html] has an absolutely classic line:

A bus ride from Phnom Penh to the "Tiger Beer Street" stop costs about 1500 riel. And the 500-meter walk to the park is free.

It's like advertising a hitchhiking tour of Australia: "No extra charge for handcuffs or burial!"

I apologize if the urls are bad – I can't cut-and-paste on this machine.

2006 Feb 02 [ Thu ]

Power problems in Phnom Penh get worse again

Over the 4-day period of Chinese New Year celebrations, I don't think there was a single power cut. I guess that means that most businesses were closed (although Lucky Supermarket seemed to be open every day).

But yesterday and today there have been several power cuts each day. Yesterday there was a very long one from about 1pm to 5 pm, followed by another from 6 to 7:30 pm, that was long enough to mess up my frozen food. If things get much worse there won't be enough time between power cuts to recharge my 12-V battery.

I was vaguely thinking about this and other AC issues the other day and remembered a trip to Spain I made about 30 years ago. I was installing some equipment in a steel mill so I had a full set of tools with me. One day I noticed a tingle when I was taking a shower in my hotel room and when I checked my trusty multimeter told me there was about 100 V AC between the hot water and the drainpipe! I tried to complain to the management, and they did move me to another room I think, but I couldn't get over to them that they should check it out urgently. (Somewhere I still have a black-and-white print of that meter readout: Pentax S3, Tri-X, handheld, available light – those were the days.)

Anyway the interesting thing (you always assumed something was going to be, right?) is that I suddenly put that together with another memory. When I started installing our equipment there I was surprised to find 120 V on the neutral line. When I checked it out the tech told me that was normal, and said that it was better. I tried to avoid conceding it was better (I couldn't quite follow his explanation because although Spanish is exceptionally easy I had only been studying it for a few weeks) and said something like "on our drawing it's called neutral and you're going to fry the next foreign engineer who comes here and doesn't check that the supply matches the drawing". He grumblingly complied (now I suppose he switched it back as soon as I left the site).

And I put it together with something else I read a few weeks ago: that Spanish *domestic* AC wiring often includes an isolation transformer. Now it all made sense. I had been very surprised that the 100 V I was measuring hadn't killed me, but it was *isolated from ground*. The sensitive meter didn't load it very much, but as soon as my body shorted it out the effective voltage was safe. The Spanish indeed do it for that reason: wiring errors which would be lethal *without* the isolation transformer become harmless.

The trouble was the Spanish had *adapted* to that. Like a hapless tourist in Phnom Penh who imagines that traffic lights mean anything, they had lowered their guard. Situations like *a short from the hot line into the water heater* were ignored and belittled.

I guess now, here in PP, I'm undergoing the *reverse* transformation. I'm building up a protective armor of car batteries, inverters, flash lights reachable in the dark, etc, etc...

2006 Jan 24 [ Tue ]

Power problem in Phnom Penh, continued

The Cambodia Daily recently published a story that said that the power outages are caused by a combination of rising demand and a power station going offline. Apparently two new power stations are going to be put into service soon and the problems will vanish as early as the end of February, if I remember the story rightly. Hm.

On a more optimistic note, the merry men in the shop where I bought my DC-powered fan assured me that it is normal for the buttons not to work: such fans are converted from regular AC operation without providing anything to handle the speed-change feature. Oh well. At least it runs happily overnight.

2006 Jan 20 [ Fri ]

More power problems in Phnom Penh; using an inverter/charger

For the first year or so that I lived in Phnom Penh there were rather few outages: perhaps two or three.

The past few months or so have gotten very bad. There are now one or two per day, lasting two or three hours.

Initially I just used candles, but as things got worse and worse I decided to set up something better. Probably the best solution would be to set up a double-pole switch right at the AC supply box so that I could use an inverter to supply the entire apartment. Unfortunately the knifeswitch on the AC supply box is broken so someone wired up one pole of the AC supply so that it's always connected! So it's hard to reorganize the wiring properly.

Also, my fridge is old and power-hungry: it would probably flatten anything but a fuel-powered generator. I'm too cheap to get anything but a Chinese inverter. So I'd always need to dash into the kitchen and power off the fridge first anyway.

Oh well... so I just bought a cheapo inverter-charger (allegedly 300 W) for 25 USD and a 12V 55Ah battery for 28 USD (don't laugh at my negotiating skills).

There were several problems with the inverter:

1. It has a voltage meter, but no current meter. So you can't tell whether the battery has finished charging or not. It also doesn't have a fuse or an on/off switch.

2. When I connected it to my TV, it died as soon as I turned on the TV. After some grumbling the shop replaced it. They swore it ought to work with a TV, although they did say the 55Ah battery was perhaps on the low side. I haven't tried it on the TV again yet because I was tired of complaining.

3. When I connected my pedestal fan, it made a nasty humming sound. After a while, I realized the fan was running much slower, even on regular AC. When I checked Google, it turned out that "modified sinewave" inverters are well known for killing fan motors. Oddly enough, complicated stuff like a laptop probably has a switching power supply itself and is not worried by non-sinewave AC, but cheapo fan motors overheat and screw up their permanent magnets. (TVs are probably OK, but they do take a large gulp at powerup which may well flatten the supply – or fry it if the cheap and cheerful designers provided no fault tolerance.)

So today I gave in and bought a fan that runs off 12V DC. I paid 13 USD. It seems to work fine, except the speed-selection buttons don't work – it's always one speed! Aargh! Now I have to return it too.

The incessant outages are particularly annoying because I think the government particularly aims them at foreign residents. The intention is to provide another sob story for foreign aid. I don't think the donors are quite as naive as they used to be, though: I will probably wind up rewiring my AC supply box before the outages stop.

2006 Jan 19 [ Thu ]

Google has links to Khmer usenet groups *and* forums

I haven't used Google Groups all that much (although I intend to post a msg on the Thai newsgroup about my Thai tone chart soon). So I was surprised to find, when I did a search for "khmer", that it leads not only to Usenet newsgroups but *also* to forum websites: groups.google.com [http://groups.google.com/groups/dir?q=khmer]

For instance, it included a link to a group at Google which is working on Khmer searching in Google. I wasn't able to check out this link because the workstation I'm on doesn't do Unicode, but maybe yours does: www.google.com [http://www.google.com/intl/km/]

2005 Nov 29 [ Tue ]

The Cambodian land system, and the attitudes it creates

For hundreds of years, land was not held privately, but was administered by the commune chief. For various reasons, the population was mostly way below the limit of what the land could support. (I think dietary problems are at the root of this: apparently the staple fish of Cambodia contains a hormone which actively interferes with vitamin processing; also, Cambodia has always had poor or non-existent iodine sources.)

The result was that most people could just ask for land to build a hut, and enough land to get food for your family: the commune chief had no objection (more families, more slaves).

So I think the unspoke ethic of Cambodians was: if you just *claim* it first, it's yours. It seems to me this explains what I observed before: people will arrange their motorbike and possessions in a line across the sidewalk *specifically* to block it. They stare at you if you attempt to weave through it (not daring to step out into the road with the utterly incompetent drivers). Maybe it's just that generations of arrests for "obstruction" have ingrained the idea in Westerners that travellers have the right of way.

Unfortunately, communal land ownership just does not work at all in a free-enterprise society. Inevitably, those in charge of the land accept (massive) bribes to transfer ownership to the rich. This is happening every day in Thailand and Cambodia: the government just does it to a different small group every time, and the rest of the sheep think it won't happen to *them*. It's like abattoirs where they thoughtfully slaughter each animal separately so as not to frighten the others.

I think I've stated before that I actually do not see *any* just way to transition from a communal-ownership system to a private-ownership system. (It reminds me of the 50s, when "agrarian reformers" was a codeword for Communists.) Even if it were somehow possible to divide the unowned land equally among all its citizens, the poor – who have never even seen a file folder – would be pitifully unable to administer it, and would wind up selling it to anyone who offered them a motorbike or a mobile phone. And anyway, it's probably true that the minimum efficient size for land cultivation is way higher than the kind of single-family plot which is enshrined in the culture of SE Asia.

Communist apologists used to say that the reason for all the horrible massacres and torture of the Soviet empire was because Marxist-Leninism had assumed that Communism would sieze power first in the most advanced countries, but instead was imposed like an ordinary coup in a reltively backward one. While I believe the current leadership of Cambodia and Thailand would probably best be fried in oil, I have to say they could make the case that their citizens are too poorly educated, and indeed just too poor, to handle land ownership. "The real estate? You can't handle the real estate!!" (Jack Nicholson)

Certainly the example of France, which managed to extract billions of dollars of subsidies every year in order merely to maintain the idyllic lifestyle of its provincial small farmers, does not fill one with hope about the ability of even advanced nations to administer land rationally. On the other hand, the USA and England mindlessly poured subsidies into farming which have caused huge areas of land to be polluted with fertilizers, weedkillers and hormones, and which caused farming to monopolize water resources – I couldn't find an overall number comparing agricultural and domestic water use, but I believe it's about 75% and 10% respectively (plus industrial, lossage, etc). Whoohoo, cheap bread. Toilet doesn't work, shower meager – hmmm, why is that?

There is a sort of summary here, but it seems to me that it has been written to obscure, not elucidate, who is really consuming available water in the US: pubs.usgs.gov [http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/2004/circ1268/]

For instance, its definition of "domestic" water use means "water epeople extracted from their own wells for their own house" and "public" means water that "may be delivered to users for domestic, commercial, industrial, or thermoelectric-power purposes" – which ensures that *personal* water use – that the government *lectures* you about – can't be compared to any other types of consumption.

Opps, off topic.

2005 Oct 25 [ Tue ]

Photo print sizes available and their prices

The Fuji lab at 130 Sihanouk (just east of the corner with 63) lists the following prices:

10x15 cm (4x6 in): 350 R

13x18 cm (5x7 in): 500 R

20x25 cm (8x10 in): 4000 R

25x30 cm (10x12 in): 6000 R

I list the inch sizes not only for convenience: the "10x15 cm" size is actually 4x6 inches, ie slightly larger. I just noticed it today, because I was printing out some small images intended to fit in a key tag, and they were just *slightly* too large. Presumably the others are likewise.

I had been aware that this was frequently the case in metric countries, but the last time I checked was ten years ago or more, and Fuji is based in a metric country fpetesake.

Incidentally Corel Draw for some reason wanted to make a 4x6-in image at 300 dpi have a pixel size of 1201 by 1801. Huh?? And a 10x12-in image that I tried was even more off, but I think I may have gummed up that one myself.

I suppose what I should have done was methodically craft calibration target files first and checked everything, but I guess I wanted to charge ahead. Oh well.

2005 Oct 16 [ Sun ]

Elizabeth Briel's blog has a great story on a Phnom Penh rail trip

She recently took the rail 'service' from Phnom Penh to Battambang and has a very enlightening article including many pictures: elizabethbriel.blogspot.com [http://elizabethbriel.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_elizabethbriel_archive.html#112884400236145992]

She sounds a lot more adventurous than I ever have been, except when getting paid.

Her story sounds entirely believable, although I wish she had been able to use some Khmer with her fellow passengers to clear up some points.

2005 Oct 13 [ Thu ]

Tried out the "ppmglobe" program to create a globe layout

This seems to work, as shown below:

pngtopnm MillerCylindrical.png | ppmglobe 12 > gores01.ppm
pnmtopng gores01.ppm > gores01.png
pnmtopng: 18 colors found
ls -l
total 512
 23176 Jan 25 2004 MillerCylindrical.png
 22516 Oct 13 08:46 gores01.png
470511 Oct 13 08:45 gores01.ppm

Original version: www.3dsoftware.com [http://www.3dsoftware.com/Cartography/USGS/MapProjections/Cylindrical/MillerCylindrical/]

Output version:

It's rather difficult to see the effect, but certainly the United Kingdom is a little cut up.

...Hmmm... why are there twelve *and a bit* gores?? Hmmm...

2005 Oct 12 [ Wed ]

How to make a globe showing Cambodian place names

For a while I was vaguely looking for a globe showing the Cambodian names for countries, etc. I had assumed one would just show up, but when I eventually asked in the shops, they said they had never heard of one.

Today I thought about trying to make one myself as a little project. Just how does *anybody* make globes? It turns out that they glue strips of paper on a sphere. This strikes me as prone to many, many errors: what if the sphere is a slightly different size than you planned? The paper has to be stretchy to conform latitudinally... but how stretchy? It probably needs to be saturated with glue to get stretchy, but what does that do to the paper and the printed design? Etc.

I don't know exactly how you would go about adding country names, longitude and latitude lines, etc to the map. I would guess that Photoshop would be quite usable, but ideally you would want to be able to reuse your overlay with other maps, and I'm guessing that would involve some stretching and stitching which Photoshop would be clumsy for. Presumably netpbm could be used (see below).

Likewise you would probably want to add some sort of guides around the actual map image to aid in cutting it out.

Suffice it to say I have not tried it yet, much less figured it out. But maybe one of you NGO types might like to check out the following links.

1. The public-domain program "ppmglobe" instantly generates an image which can be used to print out the strips needed to form the globe, based on any "cylindrical projection" source image of the globe. It's part of the "netpbm" package of hundreds of little command-line utilities, so you need to be a little bit of a propellerhead to play with it. On the good side, it's already installed at Panix.

netpbm.sourceforge.net [http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppmglobe.html]

A list of all the netpbm utilities: netpbm.sourceforge.net [http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/directory.html]

2. If you don't understand terms like "cylindrical projection" (indeed I am still not sure if that is identical with the term "Miller cylindrical projection") probably the best place to get started is probably Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection]

3. Some more stuff you will want to look at...

Another intro to map projections: www.physicalgeography.net [http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/2a.html]

Make your own globe (a manual process involving geometry as well as glue): octopus.gma.org [http://octopus.gma.org/surfing/imaging/globe.html]

Downloadable Earth map from NASA (seems to be cylindrical projection, but not sure): maps.jpl.nasa.gov [http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/earth.html]

Cylindrical projection, unfortunately very small scale, part of a large section on cartography at 3dsoftware.com: www.3dsoftware.com [http://www.3dsoftware.com/Cartography/USGS/MapProjections/Cylindrical/MillerCylindrical/]

ilstu.edu has a very good section on map projections: www.ilstu.edu [http://www.ilstu.edu/microcam/map_projections/]

For instance, ilstu.edu has a PDF of a cylindrical projection: www.ilstu.edu [http://www.ilstu.edu/microcam/map_projections/Cylindrical/Equirectangular_Cyl.pdf]

The USGS info on map projections. Clear but of course aimed aat maps of the US: erg.usgs.gov [http://erg.usgs.gov/isb/pubs/MapProjections/projections.html]

4. Google Earth

Google has a free application available for mapping. The basic idea: earth.google.com [http://earth.google.com/]

Downloads... It appears to be a 12 MB download. More worryingly, they specify a 128 kbit network speed and 200 MB of disk space. Hmmm. However, it may have some nice features, eg annotation. Somebody with more bandwidth than me may want to try the download: kh.google.com [http://kh.google.com/download/earth/index.html]

This site says Google Earth uses cylindrical projection, so maybe you can get it to spit out a world map suitable for the "ppmglobe' program: www.keyhole.com [http://www.keyhole.com/GoogleEarthHelp/Importing/Projections.htm]

2005 Oct 04 [ Tue ]

My girlfriend gets a sunburn -- so they give her Cipro

In case you didn't know, a huge, worldwide health problem is that various infectious diseases have become resistant to common antibiotic drugs like penicillin. Newer drugs tend to be less reliable than penicillin used to be, with a higher chance of side effects. And nowadays some infections turn out to be resistant to anything we have.

People argue about the root cause of this, but a lot of people blame overuse and bad compliance. What do these terms mean?

1. Overuse – drugs are used when they are unnecessary, for instance in animal feed, or when the patient probably has a virus infection, not a bacterial one.

2. Bad compliance – neither the dispenser nor the recipient understands that antibiotics *must* be taken until the full prescribed course (which may differ for different conditions) is completed. If the recipient ceases taking the drug prior to that point, the infection may well still be present, even if the patient no longer experiences symptoms. And the strain of the infection in the patient, having withstood some period of the antibiotic, has evolved to greater resistance.

I encountered a good example of this yesterday. My girlfriend had gone off on a moto to meet her family at a temple for the Bon Pchhum Ben. She had protected her head from the sun, but her arms and shoulders got a little sunburn, and she was miserable. So her sister took her to a nearby pharmacy. When she returned and I checked what she had received, she had this:

1. 6 "UPRO" (ibuprofene?) pills "200" (UPRO 200)

2. 6 Cipromed Ciprofloxacine 500 mg

3. 6 Paracetamol 500 mg

4. 12 "BC/CWP" (yellow pills)

Some of the descriptions above may be wrong – she had no written prescription slip, so I had to read the tiny writing off the cut-up foil packs that the pills were handed out in. There were no use-by dates. On the other hand, the total price was 7000 riel – less than 2 USD!

Ciprofloxacine appears to be the French for Ciprofloxacin (purely, if I know the French, to cause confusion). In other words, Cipro: the last line of defense against anthrax, among other things.

I have no idea what the yellow pills with "BC" on one side and "CWP" on the other are.

Incidentally, even Western medics here do not routinely hand out the info sheets available in the West (eg, do not take Cipro with milk/dairy/calcium).

Additionally, someone had applied talcum powder to the affected area – *drying* the skin.

I hit the roof and called a doctor: the doctor said go to Lucky's and get "After Sun" (basically aloe). I did; my girlfriend seems happy.

Multiply that by a thousand million across Asia – without the happy ending.

2005 Sep 03 [ Sat ]

My girlfriend finally gets a new ID card -- and gets copies made

My girlfriend lost her ID card some time before I met her, and I've been pushing her to clear this up for about a year. This posting is not really about the long delay: she also needed to correct the birth date (off by a month) and is actually registered still at her home town outside Phnom Penh, and I can imagine a similar situation in the West taking a similar amount of time and trouble to resolve (although I would be surprised if I were baldly solicited for a bribe as frequently as she reported).

Anyhow, I was grimly determined that she should not lose the card again, so I rapidly dragged her to a copy shop to get color copies made.

The place I went to was Pon Leu Digital Photo Express. They're on the south side of St 182, close to the intersection with Monivong. House number 28-E0. I've used them several times before and was quite happy.

They make color copies using a color scanner and Photoshop. They are quite clueful: I have had no difficulty explaining that I wanted certain output sizes, etc. Also, they evidently take care to balance the color and density curves for the printer. About the only problem I've had is that one day I found a virus on my USB stick after I downloaded some files from them, but I had gone to another photo shop that day and I don't know which was guilty. (It was a real virus, not just one of those "Windows is randomly crashing, must be a virus" things.)

This time I just said "make four color copies and ten black/white copies". I didn't check the price because they've always been OK. I was surprised to find that they output the scan four-up on a single sheet of *photo* paper. They have a full photo lab system as well, so it might have actually saved them money, but I thought it was pretty neat, and probably means improved color fastness compared with inkjet inks. They also scanned the *rear* of the card, output that on another 4x6, and then cut them out, glued them back-to-back, trimmed them, then laminated them, producing a very impressive copy which most people would accept as the original.

I want to point out that while this may seem straightforward, it was a lot of work beyond the bare bones of what I asked for; also, it relied on significant experience: for instance, making sure that the card dimensions were scaled exactly 1:1 after the various stages of conversion.

One strange thing I noticed was that when the operator did the second scan (of the rear of the card), and Photoshop called the HP driver again, it had to warm up the bulb again for a minute or two before executing the scan, even though the previous scan had been less than a minute before. I think either something is wrong with the setup or that driver really doesn't play well with Photoshop. (Fully powering-off and rewarming the bulb on every scan can't be good for bulb life – or color consistency – either.)

I was a little disappointed in the BW copies: they apparently used an ordinary copier, so the resolution and contrast were not very good – I had been hoping they would output to BW laser from the color scan. Still, they managed to line up the front and rear copies almost exactly on a single sheet of paper, and I'm quite happy with the result.

I've noticed before that Cambodians seem really good at this kind of computer operation. It may be that under the current conditions the kind of people who would be manning the Cambodian equivalent of Bell Labs have to eke out a living tinkering with Photoshop, but it certainly is one of the most encouraging features of living here.

2005 Aug 11 [ Thu ]

Interesting comparison of English-language and Khmer-language articles

In a previous posting I reported that Hun Sen tolerates English-language dissent, but not Khmer-language.

I saw an interesting example of that this week. The Cambodia Daily provides a Khmer-language center section, in which some of the English-language articles are translated into Khmer. Yesterday there was an article about the sentencing of opposition lawmaker Cheam Channy on Tuesday on the front page, several paragraphs long, mentioning much condemnation of the verdict by foreign and NGO groups.

What appeared in the *Khmer*-language section was a single paragraph which baldly detailed the charges and the sentencing.

Hmmm. If that reflects the sense of caution of the Cambodia Daily, imagine how much more cautious the autochthonous media must be.

2005-08-13 CORRECTION

I just saw that issue again and there appears to be a "continued on p." line after the last line of the Khmer version that I read. Aargh! Oops.

Now they don't give change in dollars in Phnom Penh

I wrote a posting before about the peculiar situations you get into because Cambodia uses dollars for large transactions and riel as change: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/cambodia/Miscellaneous/countingchange01.html]

When I wrote that, the exchange rate was around 4100 R to the dollar. Now it's maybe 4250 R, and there's been a very noticeable change in the behavior of Cambodians making change.

Previously, most places that made change would return only fractions of a dollar in riel. For instance, if you paid with a 20-USD bill for a 2.50-USD item, you would get 17 dollars and 2000 R.

Now, most places – without apology – are converting the 17.50 change into R at the 4000 R rate, and returning 70,000 R. You have just lost 17.50 x 250 R, ie 4375 R – more than a dollar. My internet cafe that I have used almost every day is casually stealing from me, and when I insist on dollar change they grumble.

I guess I'm going to have to start going to the money-changers at Central.

2005 Jul 13 [ Wed ]

The Cambodian Night Crusher

I heard about the phenomenon of sleep paralysis years ago. Here's a very readable article: sciencenews.org [http://sciencenews.org/articles/20050709/bob9.asp]

At the time I absorbed an explanation that is actually not covered in the above article. The explanation was that because (for whatever reason) we need to dream during sleep, it's an important safety precaution for the body to turn off normal muscle control so that we don't hurt ourselves. In sleep paralysis, for some reason, the paralysis gets out of sync with the actual sleep, so even after we have woken up we continue to feel paralyzed. (In the simpler and more common case, we move during sleep, for instance, in a nightmare we thrash around till we wake up. It may be related to sleepwalking, too, although a sleepwalker feels that he is still asleep while he is moving around.)

The above rationale does not explain a frequent concomitant of such episodes: a hallucination of some sort of demon or other malevolent entity or entities who menace the paralyzed victim. In societies where most members retain belief in supernatural entities, such as Thailand and Cambodia, such episodes are routinely recounted and passed on as supernatural events. (The above article refers explicitly to Cambodians.)

This reminds me that the Cambodians may have a different attitude to sleep than Westerners, perceiving less demarcation between the states. It is certainly true that Cambodians seem to be able to survive by sleeping in tremendously noisy environments, such as the waiters and waitresses I see sleeping next to the vast air conditioning unit on the sidewalk along Monivong outside the fish restaurant. It reminds me that yesterday my girlfriend said to me in English "I have to sleep for two hours when I get a stomachache" and I said "You mean *lie down* for two hours, right?" because the Cambodian "deyk" means both "sleep" and merely "be lying down". (She assented.) When I was in the army I occasionally had to work four-hour shifts, and I found them extremely debilitating: I was wakeful in my sleeptime and sleepy in my work time. Cambodians have adapted to their conditions but at what cost? (In my own case I actually slept underneath the motor-generator set...)

The article suggests that sleep paralysis explains many accounts of encounters with LGMs. My own guess is that intelligence agencies have routinely used paralyzing drugs as an aid in investigations and dirty tricks. The "date rape drug" Rohypnol ("roofies") is a notorious way of achieving what the "Men in Black" did (in the movies) with an electronic gizmo: it erases your memory of events. So the fuzz can shove their way into your apt, stick you with a drug cocktail, and interrogate you and search your apt, and you remember nothing.

Or possibly, you remember something. Anesthesia, even under optimal conditions, is not an exact science: the effects have to be carefully monitored to adjust the dose. Many incidents have been reported in which surgical patients were administered the wrong combination of drugs, and were in agony throughout the operation and yet unable to move. One drug commonly administered to surgical patients has the same memory-obliterating effect as Rohypnol; perhaps such events are common, but remembered by the patient only as a steely determination never to undergo surgery again.

In my own case, several years ago, I remember lying in bed, paralyzed, next to my wife, watching as an attractive girl said something to me scornfully, while she ordered several men to do something in the apt. There was no sense of the supernatural, or of horror; the girl seemed to simply find the situation amusing. After a couple of minutes I fell asleep and when I woke up again there was no evidence that anything had happened. A psychologist, I suppose, would say that I fitted the basic physical experience into my belief system just as the Cambodians do.

2005 Jul 06 [ Wed ]

My carping criticism of a new school in Tramung Chrum, Cambodia

www.iht.com [http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/05/opinion/edlightman.php]

In the above account in the International Herald Tribune by Alan Lightman, a professor of humantities at MIT, he said he felt "proud to be an American" at a ceremony where local dignitaries came to attend the opening of a new school in a remote town in Cambodia.

I guess I know what he means. It does feel better to build a school than to bomb it.

Still, I want to add my usual dyspeptic comments.

As it happens, a few days ago my Cambodian girlfriend described to me just such a ceremony at her own village school years ago. She, like the children in Lightman's account, had to sit still on the ground in the sun while waiting for the dignitaries to arrive and sit on chairs in the shade. She said she felt angry, but "ha ha – only baby – how to do?".

Those dignitaries are all the same people who could have provided the funds for such a school before, but didn't, because the money they received from the West paid for their SUVs, villas, and bank accounts in Thailand and Singapore.

It reminded me of the 40s and 50s, when the USA sent food aid to Asia, and the food was carefully poured out of every bag marked "US AID" and into a new bag marked with the name of a local vendor, and then sold. Sometimes these relabelled bags were actually presented at ceremonies attended by US officials (but usually the officials could not read the local language).

I'm going to quote what Lightman says about the children:

the 150 children squatting in front of the platform, miraculously holding still in the heat, listening to the long speeches.

What are the children *learning* from this? Do they think that these cops, and politicians, and motley clergy, actually paid for the school? I think they're clever enough to know that the money came from the West, and Lightman, but by sitting among that wellfed rabble of vampires he *legitimizes* them. The children think "nobody in the world will bring us justice, and we must squat in the dirt and smile."

2005 Jun 19 [ Sun ]

The washbasins at Lucky Burger on Sihanouk

I often eat Lucky's. I find their pizza slices quite tasty, and their orange juice – while not *exactly* tasting like fresh orange juice – is really enjoyable.

One drawback is that the toilets are outside the building, down two flights of stairs, and in the middle of the parking garage (oh and they stopped providing signs halfway, in English or Cambodian).

So I was happy when I noticed a washbasin set up inside the eating area. I thought "that would be nice in the USA too, because often one wants to wash one's hands but doesn't, because the idea of entering the toilet puts one off completely".

Then this week I saw a mother with a toddler sit him on the basin and *wash his feet* in it! And then she *washed his shoes* in the basin! I was dumbstruck.

The next day I saw *another* woman washing her toddler's feet. This time, a westerner, who must have been able to see her doing it, got up right afterwards and washed his hands there...

I asked my girlfriend if this was something normal in Cambodian society and she gave me the impression she found it rude too. My thought is *why* would someone wash the feet *and* shoes? I would guess that the toddler had stepped in doggy doo-doo. Bleagh.

Counting your change in Cambodia

Cambodia has a strange two-currency system that I have never heard the like of elsewhere. Although they print their own currency – the "riel" – the US dollar is accepted everywhere and normally preferred for large transactions. But US *coins* are never used in Cambodia: they always provide change in riel.

The posted exchange rate has hovered around 4100 riel to the dollar as long as I've been here, but when Cambodians make change they use a conversion of 4000 to the dollar. This seems OK, but it has a few consequences that I did not realize until recently.

1. The normal situation is: the price is 4.50 USD, you give them 5 USD, they give you 2000 R change. But 50 cents is actually about 2050 riel, so they are jipping you 50 R. BFD.

2. However, they *never* let *you* jip *them*. If the price is a dollar, and you give them 4000 R, they wil demand an extra 100 R (sometimes more!).

3. Likewise, if the price is 0.50 USD and you give them 2000 R, they will *still* demand an extra 100 R. When you point out that the difference is only 50 R not 100, they get huffy and say something like "why is the rich foreigner arguing about 50 R?" Yeah, well why are *you* arguing about it?

4. Worse, watch out for change from a twenty. Now, there is some legitimacy in the fact that they don't necessarily have a wide range of dollar bills for change. Cambodians are normally paid in riel, so an establishment that deals with Cambodians almost exclusively will have few USD on hand. However, they shamelessly do the conversion at 4000 R, even for a 20 USD bill. If you pay say 20 USD for a 4.50 check, and get 62,000 R back, you have just been robbed of 1550 riel. Reconsider your tip!

Huffing boy on Monivong

I often shop at the new IBC stationery store on Monivong, as well as the PTC computer store next to it. So I often pass the northern corner of that block on Monivong.

I've been noticing a young boy. He always seems alone. He's dirty and bedraggled. Quite often he is asleep, sprawled out on the sidewalk at that corner. I suppose he's maybe 10 or 12.

A few days ago I remarked on him to my girlfriend as we passed, and she pointed out a detail I had missed: he was holding a paper bag to his face, ie the practice known in the US as "huffing". Poor little guy. Alone, helpless, slowly dying.

2005 May 28 [ Sat ]

Fake booze sold in Phnom Penh

One of the interesting things about living in Thailand and Cambodia is that you cannot trust any brand names. That's all very well if you're looking at a "designer" handbag – it's probably OK. But what if you're buying drugs for your heart problem? Or something else essential to life, like booze?

I tried a bottle of vodka a few months ago from Lucky at Soriyaa Mall. I had never heard of the brand before but it seemed OK – it's not tough to make adequate vodka.

Then later I bought the same brand from Lucky on Sihanouk Blvd, and it was undrinkable. I have low tastes: "undrinkable", for me, makes me worry that it's not even *ethyl* alcohol. I was surprised; I started wondering if it was OK to keep spirits bottles on their sides (as I was doing to save space in the fridge): maybe it was pulling lead out of solder in the cap, or something.

Then I bought Bacardi Gold from Lucky on Sihanouk, and it was undrinkable too. Now a lot of *wine* that's sold in Asia – especially in restaurants – is undrinkable because the fools have exposed it to sunlight and heat in storage, and let the corks dry out etc. But I've never heard of *spirits* succumbing in that way. So I was pretty sure Lucky on Sihanouk was scamming its customers. I'm also pretty sure that means that half the places selling booze in Cambodia sell the same rotgut booze with a pretty label; Lucky's is a big, bright, Western-style supermarket, not one of those grimy one-wide shopfronts that look like the russian roulette scene in "The Deer Hunter".

You're going to think I was pretty stupid, but I actually bought a bottle of Stolichnaya at Lucky's on Sihanouk too, just to prove the point: indeed, it was undrinkable.

Later I bought Bacardi Gold, Stoly, and a couple of bottles of Jamesons at Bayon Supermarket on Monivong, and they were fine.

I was talking to a girl who buys liquor for her expat bar and she confirmed that she has to struggle to avoid getting stuck with this poison. At least one bar supplier has *only* fake booze available.

My girlfriend (unknown to me) took the bad booze I had hanging around and presented it to her friends. Fortunately nobody died or went blind, although one of them did not know what vodka was and drank it like sarsaparilla. Nobody, also, volunteered any complaints about the taste, although she had told them I had turned up my nose at it. I conclude that Cambodians who profess that booze at certain places is OK may be mistaken. (I suppose it's conceivable that the booze buyer at Lucky's knows no better.)

2005 May 09 [ Mon ]

Somebody tried to steal my pants last night

You are perhaps imagining that the title of this posting refers to someone driven mad by desire at the sight of my chiselled Western bod, but not so. Instead, I mean someone tried to hook my pants, left hanging up in the bedroom, through the open window. (I should perhaps make it explicit that I am using "pants" in the US sense, ie trousers not underpants. I think even a Cambodian would disdain to steal my underpants.)

As usual in Phnom Penh, the houses on my street are cheek-by-jowl, so someone on the balcony/walkway of the house next door is close enough to my house to reach in.

It was about 0330. I was still awake, though drowsy. My eyes were closed, but I heard a "clunk" against the side of the building. A few seconds later, I heard something else that seemed very close. I opened my eyes, intending to get out of bed and go to the window to look out. But as soon as I opened my eyes I saw a pole reaching through