Chris Todd at the Cambodian National Library, Phnom Penh
Chris Todd from the National Library of New Zealand, Wellington, is spending 2006 at the National Library in Phnom Penh. These are her notes.
Dear All
The highlight of the last 3(?) weeks was a visit from Sonia who is currently working in Ho Chi Minh City.
The new treat for this visit was Phnom Thamao zoo, an animal rescue centre, about an hour south of Phnom Penh. It's spread over a large area with big enclosures, often some distance apart - not walkable in this heat and there were 4 of us sharing a taxi. Lots of trees and good places for the critters to hide - the porcupines were well tucked in and all we could see were some quills.
Loads of different animals, virtually all native to Cambodia: monkeys, deer, bears, tigers, leopards, otters and loads of birds.
The large aviary seemed to have as many birds perching on top as there were inside. We also went to Siem Reap the trip up in the rainy season was a real contrast to my previous trip in May. Last time it was dry and brown and flat and I couldn't imagine anyone coming here for the scenery.This time was emerald green with new rice and water everywhere. Loads of classic sights, people planting rice, ploughing with water buffaloes, little boys riding buffaloes, people poling long canoes, and fishing everywhere, with fishing poles, with nets, with fish traps... it was just beautiful.
We spent 1 day touring temples, which i enjoyed as much as ever. For me it was a return to 2 major temples, Angkor Wat and the Bayon - wonderful to go slowly and focus on parts I hadn't seen before or return to places I particularly liked. Also went to one other temple and realised again how much the focus of tourists is on 4 major temples. Preah Kahn is a significant temple in the main area, but was very very quiet and just gorgeous to wander around.
There was a day for shopping and treats, including massages, and we managed to find 2 very nice bars for our pre-dinner drinks. On this theme I am currently in a new-ish bar just around the corner from my hosue. Across the road is a cluster of newsagents - they build little booths on the footpath and have umbrellas in front to protect the newspapers and patrons from sun and rain. Next to them is the entrance to the local pagoda - Wat Lanka - a bright yellow gate with touches of blue.There's the usual traffic, cars, motorbikes, tuktuks, a small child on a bright purple tricycle, the occasional cyclo and a street seller selling Cambodian sandwiches - a baguette with pate, green papaya salad, some other vegetables, dressing and chili sauce. Staying with food, my lunch treat at my other library on Wednesday included freshwater shrimps cooked with water lily stems. Exotic? Very tasty.
I bought a rather gorgeous Cambodian cookbook recently and we used it as part of my Khmer lesson yesterday. I have started learning to read and write the script. Don't expect to get far in the remaining 5 months, but it is absolutely fascinating. We're combining it with pronounciation practice as Khmer is phonetic writing as far as I can tell. The script is quite beautiful as well. It's starting to get dark now - the full moon is coming up just beside the main temple in the pagoda area and there are a few little bats flitting around.
Enjoy your
weekend
Love to you all
Chris
Dear All
Late Saturday afternoon and I'm in yet another cafe. This time overlooking the park where I walk in the mornings. It's kite-flying time and the park is just buzzing.
.
Another rugby game earlier today - time differences meant that the All Blacks vs Wallabies screened at 12.30 pm at the Gym Bar here. Quite a good NZ presence in the bar (or maybe we just made more noise) I enjoyed it more than the previous game, although this may be my last game of the year.
Walked there and back with rain on the way back - just enough to be pleasantly cooling (I know that probably sounds weird in NZ at this time of year!) Past the palace with its soft yellow walls and the monks in their brilliant orange and matching umbrellas - fantastic colours.
It's been quietish week, however I have been out to eat. On Tuesday I went
with a group of VSA people to a "blue plastic chair" restaurant called
Cafe de Carol, near the old market. It's a kind of mid-range local restaurant
- large indoor and pavement seating (on blue plastic chairs) and it has a menu
in English as well as Khmer. The food was Chinese - we shared sweet and sour
pork, vegetable fried rice, fish with a sharp Khmer sauce, pork with noodles
and a beef dish, plus rice of course. The beers were poured over ice and straws
provided - we're not in Wellington anymore!
Today (Sunday) encouraged by Sue, I cycled to the Russian Market. We're talking
major boulevards and traffic anarchy, but I wore my helmet and drove carefully
and actually it wasn't too scary. I always enjoy this market and today our meeting
place was a coffee stall. They serve iced coffee in tall glasses with lots of
ice and an extra shot of hot coffee in a glass on the side, to pour in as a
topup when the ice melts. This particular stall also provided chilled facewipes
- a sure way to attract customers on a hot day. And as is the way here, the
woman sitting next to us was a French-Khmer who lectures in social psychology
in Amiens and is in Cambodia doing research on reconciliation. There are some
very interesting people working here.
Love to you all
Chris
Dear All
Sitting in Phnom Penh, drinking Lao coffee, listening to Ali Farkar Toure (from
Mali, I think) and looking at a North & South photograph of a NZ paddock
in the summer, with cabbage tree in the foreground. 6 months today since I left
NZ.
It's Sunday afternoon and soon I'll join my first Hash House Harriers excursion (with the walkers, not the runners). It's very steamy - a burst of rain for about 10 minutes did nothing to ease the humidity.
The rainy season is also the windy season and the kitesellers have suddenly appeared around the parks and along the river. In the late afternoons the parks are full of kids with brightly coloured plastic kites - quite beautiful.
Last week I had another visitor from NZ, Anne and am now catching up with the Listener and North & South. With each new visitor I find another new delight in Phnom Penh. This time it was a sunset boat trip along the riverfront. Such a delight to drift down the Tonle Sap and around into the Mekong for a bit and then back again. The Tonle Sap river has changed direction in the last month or 2 and now flows from south to north, taking water from the Mekong upstream to the lake. Later in the year, when the level of the Mekong drops, the flow of the Tonle Sap will change back to flow north to south towards the sea again. It's a most strange phenomenon.
Now back from the "Hash" A great walk down lanes and across farmland
just south of Phnom Penh. We travelled down to the start on the back of a truck
in the rain. Not your true tropical downpour - I didn't have a coat and really
didn't need one. However the rain contributed to the major feature of the walk
- the mud. River silt makes great mud, it's incredibly slippery and clings beautifully,
so we were all skating along with great masses red-brown caking our shoes and
very splattered legs. The walkers were a large straggly group - about half Khmer
and other others a mix of nationalities, a few children along as well - very
amiable. The finish of the walk was the house of one of the organisers and there
were drinks and silly songs followed by a very nice barbecue in standard western
style: sausages, baked potatoes lettuce salad and hamburger patties with white
bread rolls & tomato sauce (with chili sauce on the side - we are in Cambodia
after all!). So it was a great way to spend an afternoon and I will go again.
Hope it's getting warmer in Wellington
Love to you all
Chris
Dear All
At my local pub for a quick drink before heading out to the airport to meet
Maria - beer and peanuts and watching the street parade.
Bali was glorious - lush, green, clove-scented and deliciously cooler than Phnom Penh. We (Ikey & I) snorkelled, went for lots of walks, did some spectacular navigation on some back roads of Bali (if I say so myself) and generally had a very good time. Ikey took me on some great cycle rides around the lanes of Legian and Kuta - a lovely way to get around - with the traffic contributing the odd exciting moment, but nothing like the mayhem of Phnom Penh. Highlights were:
1. Amed, a very laid back beach resort with snorkelling off the beach and little butterfly-sailed fishing boats that go out to sea and sunset and return at sunrise.
2. the Ubud arts festival where we saw a 1000-performer kecak dance, 2 women's gamelan orchestras and many other performances. All this in the soccer field in the centre of town.
3. Balian - an out-of-the-way surfing beach on the west coast. We stayed at a friend's house on a hill looking over the beach and the sunset - very quiet and quite blissful.
Another little treat was sitting by a rice field drinking beer and watching the herons and egrets flying in to roost in trees around a village not far from Ubud. While it wasn't the "Attenborough event" that I was anticipating from the guidebooks, it was still very nice.
It's now Sunday and I've been doing the usual weekend chores - housework, cycling to the market for fruit and veg. and then round to the local French cafe for a fresh baguette. It's been a busy first week back. My family and neighbours were really welcoming on my return, as were the library staff. Another NZ librarian, Isobel Mosely, has just arrived to spend 3 months in Phnom Penh while her husband works here. Isobel has a long association with the National Library of Cambodia and will be working (as a volunteer) at the library again while she's here.
Maria's visit was great - lots of catching up with news from home - especially news of the National LIbrary. She also visited the library here. We dined out nicely - there really are some very good restaurants here - and also went to a shadow puppet performance. Yesterday we followed a self-guided architecture tour of central Phnom Penh - well part of it - it was a bit hot to walk for 3 hours! The tour was great - covered a wide range of building styles, from French colonial through deco, 40s moderne and some rather wonderful 60s buildings. Later in the day Maria left for the next phase of her journey to France and I joined 3 other NZers at a sports bar to watch the 2nd Bledisloe Cup game.
This bar has televisions on every available wall space so no matter where you sit there's a screen in view. It was full and a predominantly Australian crowd - so there were a few wisecracks about my All-Blacks t-shirt. I really enjoyed the game, for someone who watches rugby about once a year it was very exciting. Afterwards it just seemed right to go to an "English Pub" near the river and have a hamburger and chips.
So I guess I feel quite settled back here again and ready for my next guest
- Anne Anderson, also from the National LIbrary, who arrives here next Friday.
It really is great seeing people from home and I love showing off what I consider
to be the delights of Phnom Penh. I do hope it's getting warmer for you all
and, for the Wellingtonians at least, that the film festival continues to be
a great winter treat.
love to you all
Chris
Dear All,
It's positively cool this evening with light rain. Maybe the elusive rainy
season has finally started. I can hear crickets and the background hum of traffic,
the tuktuk guys talking out in the street and faint strains of traditional music
from a nearby restaurant. I'm just back from dinner with Amanda, another VSA
volunteer. We went to a very nice Punjabi restaurant near the riverside. Quite
a change to have a thali and proper naan bread.
Last weeks' cooking class was a great success. I'm now working on my green
curry paste. The teacher is an extraordinary woman - very strong. 11 years &
5 children in a Thai border refugee camp - husband left so she has kept the
family together on her own. Has also been an HIV/AIDS counsellor- pretty impressive
for someone with enough problems of her own. The class (there were only 2 of
us) began with a tour of a large local market - partly to buy for the class
but also just to see what is available. It was fascinating and of course great
being able to ask about everything. Herbs are very important in all the delicious
salads here and the variety is impressive. Some, like coriander & lemongrass
I recognise from NZ but many I've never seen before. Fresh turmeric is a standard
ingredient in curry pastes along with galangal and something they call rhizome
- they all look a bit like root ginger. We also saw the green papaya sellers
- they slice up the papaya ready to make into the salad which is a very common
side dish. We made red and green curry pastes, amok - fish curry steamed in
banana leaves, sausages wrapped in banana flower petals, and a rice flour dessert.
I was very full by the end of the day! And very tired as we were basically on
our feet from 9 - 4.
A very different culinary experience was the bug - a large cricket or cicada fried in garlic and soy sauce I think. My landlady was cooking them and I foolishly stopped to see what was going on. The offer of one to try quickly turned into a challenge, so what could I do? It was crunchy but not unpleasant if I didn't think about what I was eating!
And another world altogether on Wednesday, a violin duo playing at Le Royal
hotel. Invitation only, but a French guy who is based at the Library got invites
for Beth and I. The music was fabulous - Bach, Mozart, Paganini and Ravel. And
afterwards there was supper - all sorts of little treats from the best hotel
in town. The treats just keep coming here!
It's now Saturday morning and I'm out and about with errands of various sorts.
If the rain holds off I may watch some rugby this afternoon! Cambodia versus
Laos playing for the Mekong Cup. Amanda and some friends of hers are planning
to go so I hope to join them. Will report back later!
Love to all
Chris