The Electric Home Shower

Above the bathtub looms a faded yellow box suspiciously labeled “the electric home shower.” I suspect it has something to do with getting hot water, but I’m unwilling to fiddle with aging electrical equipment suspended over a pool of bathwater and simply eye it warily as I take my cold showers.

Today is my day off (I work a Sunday to Thursday shift) so I ask a motorcycle driver to take me to Wat Phnom (again), from which I plan to find my way to nearby sites. I asked someone yesterday at the office to teach me how to say “sorry” so that I can apologize to the tuk tuk drivers who wait around the Daily staff house and whom I leave disappointed when I give my business to a motorcycle driver. Tired of the jeers of these rejected tuk tuk drivers when I flash my thighs to straddle the motorcycle in a skirt, I now ride side-saddle.

To Wat Phnom it's one long stretch along Norodom Blvd. It’s a left turn from the Daily staff house’s sidestreet, and the driver has to drive a while into incoming traffic before he can worm his way to the right hand side of the road.

We hurdle past the pale-yellow colored concrete walls of the ministry of the interior and the guards who usher black sedans in and out of its entrances. Opposite the ministry are mostly gated communities: big gates conceal neighborhoods of white and yellow villas that are each in turn fenced in with their own gates.

Past the roundabout at independence monument, residential villas dissolve into open-front nail salons where women sit idly filing their nails as they wait for customers, stores selling Khmer formal wear, and dozens of little markets selling drinks, snacks, cigarettes, and "OK" condoms. The markets double as restaurants with fold out tables and plastic chairs set up on the sidewalk.

Near Paragon mall, four crouching boys play with marbles. Further down the street, two men are using a blowtorch to cook a headless pig.

A university with rows and rows of motorcycles parked within its gates has draped an enormous sign over its entrance welcoming its new students from South Korea. Another university hangs a similar banner congratulating its soccer team, which apparently won some Cambodian collegiate cup.

A recent article in the Cambodia Daily profiled an NGO that has sent a soccer tem to South Africa to play in some sort of children’s cup, under the slogan “Don’t play with landmines. Play soccer.”

When traffic stops at an intersection to watch the blinking red lights count down from 40 something, a teenaged boy hops of the sidewalk and weaves through the motorcycles, selling Khmer language newspapers.

I see what I think are two traffic cops parked in plastic, purple chairs just off the road. One looks disinterested, and the other is tinkering with his phone.

There is no such thing as “that motorcycle almost hit me!” in Phnom Penh, because everyone “almost hits” you. There is also no such thing as cutting someone off, tailgating, or speeding. The only rule of the road seems, to me at least, to be: get where you need to go without actually crashing into anyone else. Crossing the road is an expedition. I think I’ve gotten very good at it. By “very good at it” I mean that I have yet to cause injury to either myself or to another party.

In the early afternoon I visit the central market – an enormous yellow-colored dome structure packed with a maze of vendors. Stalls sell grey suits, shirts with “Gucci” spelled in rhinestones on the front, checkered cloth, souvenir elephant figurines, sneakers, electronics, glittery jewelry, decorated curtains, makeup, and bridal magazines.

For whatever reason, most of the tourists seem to be buying underwear: Calvin Klein briefs and lacy, candy-colored thongs.

Vendors are sitting together on little stools eating their lunch and call after me “Lady! Do you need belt? Do you need purse? Do you need Buddha statue?” “Lady,” which connotes “foreign woman,” is what I’m called in Cambodia. Due to the tremendous presence of NGOs, Cambodians are very used to foreigners, but I, because of my height and light skin, hair, and eyes – and, simply, because I’m also young and female - attract significant attention.

On a motorcycle from Central Market to Wat Ounalom, an expansive complex that houses many of the city’s monks and once housed more than 500 before the Khmer Rouge executed most of its inhabitants, I see a huge group of perhaps 20 or 30 tourists. Each of them is riding in a bicycle contraption where the driver sits on a raised seat and peddles, and the passenger sits in a little shaded seat in front of him.

The vehicles make a long procession down the road, and I feel irrationally superior as I speed by them on the back of a motorcycle, sitting side-saddle, helmetless, and with my hands in my lap. Really, these tourists nestled safely in their comfortable seats are spectacularly more intelligent than I am.

Phnom Penh is a city of low-rise buildings with red and occasionally blue tiled roofs. Over most businesses are apartments accessed by outdoor spiral staircases. Women hang their laundry out the windows and on balconies, and in Wat Ounalom the orange cloths monks wear are strung out on clotheslines. Very few buildings are more than four stories tall, and those that are often serve as landmarks. When I want to go home, I tell a motorcycle driver to take me to the nearby several story hotel, the location of which he is more likely to know than, in a city of seemingly randomly numbered streets, the actual street where I live.

All the way home I notice the sagging messes of droopy electric wires that run along the streets. The Cambodian man I met on the plane, A., told me was an electrician in the United States. When I ask him if he plans to find work as an electrician in Phnom Penh he balks at me: “There’s no demand for electricians in Phnom Penh!”