There was a time before we lived in Phnom Penh but did live in Cambodia, when we would visit once every two or three months. Those trips introduced us to the city and the lifestyle we now embrace as well as providing entertainment, eateries and supplies unavailable elsewhere .
I can clearly remember looking up at quirky little balconies, decaying exteriors and wooden shuttered residences and wondering how you even entered those buildings. Now I notice the street side entrances and visualise the spaces and stairs concealed within.
The hunt for an apartment showed us the many configurations of those entrances and exits and yes there are sometimes two. The alleys and laneways are the clue to it and many interconnect. Shortcut communities.
In that initial search, I’m not ashamed to say that I found many of the entry points both daunting and confusing. It was confrontational wandering past someone’s open, front door in a stairwell landing, or seeing the bathroom and toilet across the hall from the front door of the residence and even wandering past a commercial kitchen serving the front room restaurant space to access the stairwell to four apartments above.
That is to say nothing of the crumbling walls and mouldy, life stained surfaces of entrances that are smack up against glittering, glass and chrome skyscrapers or lead to dimly lit mazes of more interconnected alleys and stairwells, or ritzy, recently renovated, old, colonial buildings that have become world class, five-star hotels.
Now, I love the laneway action. I stare down them and if there is light at the end of that dark tunnel of buzzing activity, I’ll happily stroll through. I enjoy the interactions of young kids doing their homework, playing or shouting, “Hello, hello.”
There are also elderly residents playing cards, sipping tea or eating bowls of noodles from tables with plastic tablecloths with the pattern worn off.
They are served from carts, or by vendors with mobile, food and drink stands wedged in the limited available space or carried through on shoulder poles.
Youth sit perched on their parked motos or on the steps. Women of various ages happily gossip and have their toenails painted by mobile beauticians, with nothing more than a stool and a basket to carry to the next customer. The stairs are also a whole other world.
We live off one such alley with at least three sets of stairs leading off it to structures facing the same number of directions and now our front door is mostly open so anyone on the landing can peer in and people often do.
It is a hive of bustling activity with a semi-permanent fixture of free standing, charcoal fired, clay pots for cooking massive vats of rice and woks full of boiling oil for frying dishes to be delivered to street stalls in the neighbourhood. All that gets packed up and put away at the end of trading every day. Exactly the same cooking arrangement operates from the third floor hallway with the same folk selling from street or market stalls. There are at least two front rooms, at ground level that are shops selling cold drinks, cigarettes, snacks and household basics all day and half the night and that room doubles as a family bedroom too. Another operates as a hair and nail salon. Children play, dogs roam, neighbours gather, recyclers, knife sharpeners and bread and snack vendors ply their trade in these confined spaces. On weekends a traditional, Khmer strategy game like chess, sometimes gets set up around a table and stools emerge when a tour guide leads in foreign tourists to introduce them to the game.
The population evolves but there is a stable community of residents, locals and a few expats like us, who smile, greet each other and interact several times a day. With minimal shared language and a healthy sense of harmony, understanding, acceptance and belonging, we look out for each other and help each other to feel comfortable, welcome, safe and secure, not just in our hidden enclave of the city but also when we spot each other on the streets or in the markets. It’s magic.
I have not forgotten those early laneway experiences and warn any prospective guests that the alley is dark, twisting and often filled with motorbikes or scooters and then it’s a four-storey, stairs only climb crossing from one building to another at an upper level to reach our front door. To say nothing of the stairs themselves being treacherous despite the efforts of a few of us to renovate and stabilize them. Most guests are up for the challenge and thus far after over two and a half years of living here, only one friend has ever been able to return to our front door without being met at ground level and led up again, after just one visit. Most get the hang of it after a few visits and some never want to return I’m sure, but they don’t tell us that. Nonetheless it’s home for us and we hope it stays that way for a good while into the future.
This sense of community seems to be long gone in most places so we treasure it and it is for us, just one more thing to love about Cambodia.
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