Week 2: Palaces, Stock Counts and Cultural Differences

A busy week 2 has led to fewer blogposts than we would have liked so we'll try and cram it all in here.

Last Saturday was our first tourist day. Our perusals included a museum, a palace, a market, a riverfront and at least three eateries (which included one or two drinkeries in the evening). 

The National Museum of Cambodia

The number of times we had ‘TUK-TUK?’ yelled at us was quite something. A Westerner walking down the street piques the interest of tens of tuk-tuk drivers slouching or snoozing in the back of their vehicles. I put the question mark in the speech marks above to be kind – it feels more like a command than a question in most instances, although they rarely ask more than twice to their credit. In the circumstance where we do actually require a tuk-tuk, the triumphant face of the driver who has just won work for the next 30 minutes slowly turns to a look of confusion as he realises he has no idea where we are living, despite pouring over our Google Maps for five minutes and asking every other driver in the vicinity. Phnom Penh, like most cities, is pretty large, but there’s no such thing as a taxi driver exam here so who knows where you’re going to end up – the driver certainly doesn’t! Our directional commands in Khmer and our own understanding of the local area are much improved now though as a result. Proper locals us.

Left: Spires at the Royal Palace | Right: Grins

Architecture at the Royal Palace. To the right is a perfect example of the Cambodian way (scaffolding with bamboo): completely haphazard but somehow seems to work.

For those that know us well, Sunday was fairly predictable; off to church we went. We’ve sat in numerous services back in the UK where we’ve sent off missionaries to far-flung places to go and tackle injustice, but this time we were the ones in that far-flung place, meeting those that had previously been flung. Just think about how inspiring these churches are, full of people who have just picked up their stuff when called and followed! It was brilliant to take communion and worship with others, on the other side of the world.

We also got to properly meet the young Khmer women who are working with the homestay couple, producing beautiful soaps as a social enterprise venture, having tough backgrounds in sweat-shops and worse. The resilience of the Khmer people, despite their shared and personal trials and sufferings, is something we are seeing everyday here; they as a people are miraculously cheerful, smiley, and easy to laugh. The girls picked us up some deep-fried bananas from a street stall nearby for our breakfast , which were as delicious as they sound!

Phnom Penh roads by day and night

Week 2 of work for us was much more office based than our first. It was time for us to actually add value after our initial week of mainly learning about the cause and how the social enterprise goes about addressing this.

Monday was cracking. Having spent 3 years at Deloitte doing everything in my (Jonny’s) power to avoid a stock count, I realised that to get the stock system up and running here, this was one hurdle too many. So I, of course, signed Amy up to it too whilst giving her as few details about what it actually entailed as possible. For the lucky lot that aren’t auditors/ don’t work anywhere near finance, a stock count is literally counting out stock to make sure the numbers agree to the system. One by one. Tedious. Except this one wasn’t at all. Despite the fan not working and thus working in heat that definitely wouldn’t have been legal back in the UK, it was actually a lot of fun. Firstly, the ‘stock’ was cuddly toys, animals, monsters – basically anything you can put the word ‘cuddly’ in front of. You just can’t be grumpy whilst surrounded by these multi-coloured, soft cotton elephants and co.! Secondly, these have all been hand-made by local women as an opportunity to build a career to get out of poverty. Again, really can’t be grumpy there. Finally, the language barrier between us and the staff just kept us on our toes. ‘Penelope’ pronounced as ‘Penellopp’ was a real highlight (made a nice change being in the right after days of amused looks with our quite awful ‘thank yous’). So, we found ourselves enjoying a stock count; the magic of Cambodia right there.

I’m (Amy) working on branding and exposure for a new campaign for the organisation which sees cute monkeys knitted by the women sustainably explore the world (they’ve been to over 20 countries already!), with the hope of raising the profile of the work they do, thereby increasing sales, and getting the number of women into employment up to 100.

The rather hot stock count

One little but interesting cultural difference is the acceptance of bare feet! Whilst it’s considered rude in Cambodia to point the soles of your feet towards another person, you are required almost everywhere you go (homes, offices, temples) to remove your sandals before you enter the building and go about your business barefoot. And it’s a good job this unspoken rule is in place: when the city roads flood (which they do on a regular basis in rainy season) the sewers overflow onto the streets… which we’re walking (or wading) on. Lovely.

Another strange difference is the way that women wear long trousers, jackets and even gloves in 30 degree plus heat. They’re not hardy against the heat, nor protecting their skin from burning or moto accidents – they’re regimentally preventing tanning. White, light skin is prized here; stores sell expensive lotions promising to lighten your skin and rich young women fly to Thailand for skin-whitening injections. As much as we struggle to understand this, they too simply can’t get their head around us wanting to darken our skin, or choosing to sun-bathe – to literally bathe in the sunlight! It is uncomfortable to see the beauty advertisements showing westernised and lightened faces, rather than embracing the beauty of their own race. It puts the beauty industry in a rather negative light. Jonny though is now pretty smug about finally being a ‘desirable’ shade…

Left: Our favourite evening spot and new favourite downtime activity! | Right: Russian Market

And now we’re just coming to the end of a wonderful second weekend but we’ll talk about that in the next post!

រាត្រីសួស្តី (Good night!) 

Jonny and Amy