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!