Cambodian comments

We leave for Thailand tomorrow so now seems to be a good time to write some general thoughts and feelings about Cambodia.

• No one in the country is older than me, it is rare to see people my age or older, this once you have noticed it is rather obvious. It gives the whole country a bit of an immature feel, there is a lot of joking around going on, at times in a rather juvenile way. The scars in this country are obvious and will take some healing, what makes it different from other genocides is that it was like on like, there are no obvious ethnic differences between the perpetrators and the victims. Every day in the news and in the papers are reports on the ongoing trials which are still only partially completed, everyone we talk to had a deep knowledge of what was happening and I got quickly lost in the ins and outs and realised it would have taken me weeks to get up to speed, a little like trying to explain the whole saga from both sides of the Northern Ireland situation in three sentences.

• This era may go down as the second age of Wat building. I think as a way of falling back to what they know, connecting with their past and creating stability the Cambodians are building new temples everywhere. We noticed it as soon as we crossed the boarder from Vietnam with every little town and large village either sporting a brand new Wat or in the process of building one. It's like driving across rural England and discovering that every village has got a brand new church.

• The king had died about three weeks before we had arrived, he is currently lying in state and apparently his funeral is not until the new year. Every Cambodian comes and pays their respects, either at the palace in Phnom Penh or at one of the other royal residences, and there seems to be one in every major town. This involves the Cambodians dressing up in their best clothes, and arriving with a lotus flower specifically folded to give to the families representatives at the palace (there were two immaculately dressed men at the palace who formally received these flowers). A book of condolence was signed, and joss sticks were lit and placed in urns put at the palace gate. I have never come across such a concentration of incense even in an enclosed space, outside it was rather intense. If you were wealthy enough you bought a bird which you released. This again was part of the Cambodians wanting to connect with their own history and making a really big thing of it.

• Their attitude to public space is interesting, i.e., if anyone can go there then it's public. This makes restaurants rather strange in that if you sit down and order food in what we could say was a nice upper bracket restaurant then as you sit there waiting for your order to arrive there is nothing to stop the woman from MacDonald's walking in with a pile of Burgers and trying to sell them to you, nor you from buying one and still seated at your nice restaurant table, eating it. People walk into pubs and happily get out their own beer.
• Their music is Awful!.... either atonal classical drone or modern sentimental pop songs, the accompanying videos played on loops on long bus trips being twee sexist trash of the first order. We wished we could avoid it but just couldn't!