I'm back home in Honolulu now, but Kampuchea still has its hooks into me. I have come to love the Khmer people like few others that I have known.

I blogged in early December about the lecture that I attended at the Reyum Institute, a museum and anthropological study center next door to the apartment where I lived with Tashi.

The lecturers ta lked about the importance of the classic wooden housing that used to exist pre-colonial times when the French introduced brick and stucco housing. Most Khmer. according to the speakers would prefer to live in brick and stucco even though the wooden houses are cooler and more conducive to living in a country where flooding is a regular part of every day life. Outside of Phnom Penh there areplenty of examples of wooden architecture. Note this house is built on stilts with the only bri k and stucco part of the architecture being the kitchen that you can see to the right ont he ground floor. Because the floors are wooden and the slats don't always completely seal there can be a natural cooling system in the house otherwise not available just through the windows.

On January 1, 2009 Cambodia had a helmet law that went into effect for all moto drivers. How well the law has been enforced has been up for debate. It certainly has led to a healthy competition among streetside vendors for moto helmets. Frankly, some of them I wouldn't even use for bike riding.. (in fact, I bought a moto helmet for riding my bike.) This gentleman hasn't gotten into the helmet thing, but hey he has what most people would consider the most important piece of equipment for moto riding the surgical mask. The streets in Cambodia are dusty, dusty, dusty. In fact, by the end of the day most folks who are wearing face masks really need to either throw them away or wash them.

In Cambodia the most common modern convenience is the cell phone. With four or five different cell companies offering services there is an ever increasing demand for time refill cards. And Cambodians being entrepreneurial have set up these phone booths all over the city. You can buy refill time in $2, $3 and $5 USD.

Oh that reminds me, the US dollar is the real exchange mechanism in Cambodia. As of Thursday 8 January the exchange rate was 4103 riels to the US dollar. So anything more than 20,000 R really needs to be done in dollars. So you give say a dollar for your 60c Coke Light and you will get back 1500 R in change... It's a unique monetary system but it works. That's what I figure it means when people say that the dollar is the worldwide unit of exchange.