Merry Christmas

Dear friends and family all over the world!
We wish you a Merry Christmas from Phnom Penh!
It´s been +32 degrees today, so we´ve spent the afternoon in the pool. Not too bad way of spending Christmas Eve, we must say..!
With all our love,
Maria & Janne

Christmas Nostalgia for all Swedes

Recognize this intro? Brings back childhood memories from Christmas 1979, doesn´t it?!

Louise visits Phnom Penh, and Polly visits the veterinary

Louise has been here on a stop over on her way home from the climate conference in Bali.It´s been wonderful and great fun to have her here; four intense days filled with shopping, sightseeing, good food and catching up.

Louise left last night, and I´m now looking forward to Janne´s arrival on Saturday. Janne himself is mostly preparing himself emotionally for leaving Polly Jean for three weeks. She´ll be staying with her beloved dog sitters Kamilla and Ville who always gives her the very best of care and attention, but of course Janne still feels it´s very sad to leave her, especially for Christmas.

Talking about Polly Jean; the visit to the veterinary for a wound on her leg, that I wrote about in the previous posting, went well. She just hates going to the vet., and is always very scared and nervous when she has to go there. But this visit went better that expected, and although it was an emergency appiontment on a Friday evening it actually turned out to be cheaper than expected, too! Below, I´m pasting Janne´s e-mail that he wrote to me to tell me how it all went. I think it´s a pretty cute story, and I´m so proud of our Polly Jean who had to put up with it all. (Sorry all my English speaking friends that you can´t read it).

SAGAN OM POLLY JEAN PÅ DJURSJUKHUSET
"När vi kom dit var Polly jätteglad och ville busa. När jag vägde
henne (30kg kärlek) fattade hon vad som var på gång. Vi fick vänta en
stund innan vi blev uppropade.

En djurvårdare lät Polly åka hissbordet upp och hon satt och skakade
lite. Hon pillade lite i såret och rakade det sedan. Polly var så
jätteduktig och satt bara och skakade lite. Jag gosade och berömde
henne. Sen pillade hon lite till i såret med en metallpinne och sa
att det nog inte behövde sys, men att veterinären ändå borde titta på
det.

Vi fick vänta så pass länge i rummet på veterinären så Polly somnade
till slut. När hon väl kom blev det samma procedur; hissbord och pill
i såret med metallpinne. Polly var lika duktig igen. Hon sa att det
inte var någon fara. Jag skulle bara tvätta det med vatten varje dag
för att hålla smuts och skorpor borta och se till så hon inte slickar
där. Sen sa hon att ´-vi glömmer att ni varit här´. Vi behövde inte
betala nåt alls! I glädjeyran köpte jag ändå en krage om hon börjar
slicka i såret samt för framtida bruk.

Jag fattar ingenting? Varför behövde vi inte betala? Det tog ju iofs
15 sek för veterinären att kolla. Eller är det för att Polly är TV-
kändis? Glad är jag i alla fall. För att det blev gratis, för att jag
åkte in och för att jag nu vet ungefär var gränsen går för vetbesök
vid sårskador.

Nu blir det pizza (Polly ska få en bit)!"

One of those days... and nights.

Today has been a really shitty day. You know the kind when you just KNOW that you should´ve stayed in bed the whole day because EVERYTHING is going wrong. You know... like waking up at 04.30 due to a killing neck pain from an old whip lash injury which maked it impossible to go back to sleep again. Taking some pain killers which of course doesn´t work. Trying to log in to your bank via Internet just to find out that there´s an error which blocks your log-in pass word FOREVER. Going to the bank just to realize that you´ve left your Visa card back home (which means that you have to drive back home through the crazy traffic and get exhausted and sweaty from going 10 stairs up and 10 stairs down again). Asking your husband to help you out with the blocked pass word just to learn that the bank will not do that, instead they are insisting that you call them yourself from the other side of the world to in some mystical way prove over the phone that you´re really you. So you make that phone call to the cost of a smaller fortune, just to find out that it was a total waste of money as the bank refuses to assist you ANYWAY. And - this is the icing on the cake - driving home from office, wondering why there´s a big crowd of people on the corner just across the road from my building; just to find out that a guy was robbed and shot to death on the spot there an hour ago... I guess that his day turned out a lot worse than mine. But anyway - there you have my day.

But there has been some good things as well. Like having my friend Johan here this evening, helping me out with the curtains which has bothered me as I´m too short to put them up myself. Actually, it turned out that Johan had a really shitty day too, probably even worse than me, (not the least as he had to fix my curtains as well). So we agreed that it can´t be a coincidence. We came to the very logical conclusion that the powers in the universe must be in great disharmony right now, turning all positive into negative. We did our best to turn it back to positive again by ordering pizza, listened to christmas music from Johan´s lap top and talk about the upcoming holidays that we both look forward to.

I must also tell you one positive thing that makes me very happy; my friend Louise will arrive tomorrow! She´ll stay with me for four days, on her way back to Sweden from Bali where she has attended the climate conference. I just can´t wait to pick her up at the airport tomorrow. So, I must say that tomorrow looks a lot more promising than today. At least, I do hope so!

PS I´m adding this a couple of hours after I did the posting above. Janne just called to tell me that Polly Jean has hurt a leg, probably during playing with friends at the doggy day care. She has a deep wound, that will probably need some stitches. They are now on their way to an emergency appointment at one of the veterinary hospitals. It´s way past midnight here now, and I´m wide awake, worrying about my beloved dog. I guess this means that the Shitty Day has decided to work the night shift and turn into a Shitty Night. Damn. I´d better go to bed now before this gets any worse than it already is. So; good night.

Cambodian rock and roll - the history and its future

Christmas spirit?

The past couple of days it hasn´t been a question about whether it´s been hot or cold here in Phnom Penh, as I was writing about in the previous posting. It´s hot. Probably around +32-33 degrees, I´d guess. In this heat, I´ve been driving around Phnom Penh to do my Christmas shopping. It started yesterday, with me and my friend Mimmi going to the International Bookstore to check out their stock of plastic christmas trees. Yes - I know; I can already hear you commenting and mumbling all the way from wherever you are; "Plastic?! How tacky, is she insane?!" Well, I don´t like this any more than you do, but I do live in Cambodia now and I don´t have very much of a choice, ok? So anyway; we found some quite impressive plastic trees in all kinds of sizes, the biggest ones more than 3,5 m tall. And giant plastic raindeers, santa claus costumes, glitter in all kinds of colours, and all kinds of christmas decorations, one tackier than the other.... Well, if it´s christmas decorations you´re after and you´re not too picky about the design being as far from minimalistic as it can possibly be, you won´t be disappointed here, that´s for sure.

I´ve never been head over heels for christmas actually, but as I´m married to someone who´d probably be best described as a "Christmas fetishist", I thought that I for the sake of love could check out the possibility of creating something that could at least vaguely remind us of a traditional christmas celebration, although we´ll be spending this christmas in a tropical heat this year. And for the same reason, I went to the western grocery store "Veggies" today, to get my beloved husband some pickled herring, which is a must for him on Christmas Eve. After that, I went to Pencil Supermarket for some grocery shopping, and found that also they are selling plastic christmas trees and were busy putting them on display outside the store;


I went inside, escaping the hot sun and spent a good half an hour in the air conditioned store, trying to cool down, doing my shopping listening to "Jingle Bells" and other christmas carrols from the loudspeakers, with the sweat still almost pouring down my back. I couldn´t help thinking that it felt a bit weird, and that I found it a bit difficult to get the different pieces together. I mean, I have my picture about what Christmas usually is like, and I just found it a bit contradictory to listen to christmas carrols and looking at christmas decorations, in a temperature of +33 degrees. But at the same time, I wouldn´t change it for the usual Christmas time in Sweden, either. With all that stress, the hectic christmas shopping where you´ll spend hours in the department stores, the darkness and the cold. That I can do without. But what, or rather who, I can´t do without is my husband. But he´ll arrive on the 22:nd, just in time for Christmas. And perhaps, we´ll go to the International Bookstore to get one of those plastic trees... Well actually, I´ve already promised him one... What don´t you do for some christmas spirit?! And your loved one :-)

Hot or cool, thats the question

In about mid October, the hot rainy season started to give in for this year and gave place to the dry season with it´s cooler temperatures. It´s not very often that we get any rain this time of the year, and the morning and evenings are comfortably cool. Well, if you can call around 26 degrees "cool" compared to the European weather this time of year, but still... By Cambodian standards it´s considered cool. Even cold. So cold that you have to put on a thick jacket and wrap up in blankets. "-It´s so cold", my Khmer colleagues are complaining and switches off the air con. "-What´s the temperature today?" I ask. "-Oh, it must be as low as 27 or maybe even 26", a colleague replies. "- M-hm" I reply. "-Don´t you think it´s cold?" she asks me. "-Well, not really. Actually, I like it, I find it very pleasant" I answer. My colleague looks a bit puzzled by the fact that the cold doesn´t seem to affect me. "-But if it was as low as.... 20 degrees" she asks, trying hard to to make me admit that Swedes actually CAN freeze sometimes, "..wouldn´t you feel cold then?" "-Well" I say, "yesterday I spoke to my husband and it´s snowing back home now, which means that it´s below 0 degrees. As that´s the temperature I´m used to, I probably wouldn´t find +20 degrees very cold. On the contrary, still very comfortable." She looks at me as I´m lying and laughs almost nervously, as she was speaking to an alien, and wraps the scarf even tighter around her slim shoulders. "-Oh, I think it´s really cold now", she states. Later the same evening when I´m leaving the office I notice that our night guard whose regular "uniform" is a cotton krama (traditional Khmer scarf) around his waist and nothing more, now is fully dressed in trousers and a sweater and on top of that is wrapped in a giant blanket. The blanket is so big that he has truble walking, and you can hardly see him in there. He´s struggling to relaease one arm from somewhere inside this giant tent, to open the gate for me. I´m driving my motorbike out on the street and accelerate when I´ve reached the main road. The wind is cool and nice towards my face, and for the first time since I moved to Cambodia, I´m thinking that it would´ve been nice to wear a long sleeved top.

Thinking back at the monsoon season with the hot temperatures and flooded streets, I welcome this time of year. Although, I must admit that the rainy season also has it´s charm. One thing that´s not so good about it though, is that the street where I live tend to get flooded when it rains. Below, I´ve published some pictures where you can see what it looks like.

When I took those pictures, I suddenly heard a loud scream from the neigbours across the street. I looked in that direction, and saw a snake crawling up from the water, into our neighbours livingroom on the ground floor. The lady who lives there was of course terrified by the unwelcome guest, which explained the screaming in this otherwise pretty quiet neigbourhood. The guys who runs the motorbike repair shop next door to her, came running and killed the snake by beating it with a stick. Poor snake... Afterwards, they played with it by putting the life less body on the tip of the stick, chasing each other. I made it pretty clear to them that I wasn´t interested in participating. I asked our gate keeper if he knew what kind of snake it was. He stated that it was poisonous, and explained that you could die from by being bitten by it. Whether it´s true or not I have no idea. Ever since a Khmer colleague of mine tried to convince me that peacocks are poisonous, I have a slightly sceptical approach to the stories being told about poisonous animals here in Cambodia... But anyhow, this snake encounter was enough for me to decide that I´ll never again walk home through flooded streets, pushing my moto with water up to my knees. Obvoiusly, you just don´t know what´s hiding in there. And thank God that I´m living on the fifth floor, I swear that I´ll never complain about that again!

Home, sweet home

This is where I live, on the top floor. That´s my balcony up there!