An interesting thing just happened… am in this coffee place near our hotel… the service is quite slow even for Cambodia… these two Americans just came in with a Cambodian guy… they ordered some food and sat down, after a little while the food appeared but I think at least one of the orders was wrong and they felt they’d waited too long. So one of their party kept going up to the bar and raising his voice in English and waving his arms around. He kept saying something about needing to get back to work.. until eventually he gave them a final earful, and the whole group left.. refusing to pay. The Cambodian in the group went up to try and pay but was told not to by the American.
It may be that they are indeed here on work but I reckon they’re pretty new here cos it really wasn’t that much of a wait by Cambodian standards. Plus when they came in they were trying to ask if this place is a ‘franchise’… which seemed a little naïve, I don’t know about you but I don’t know the word ‘franchise’ in many other languages! Plus this place definitely feels like quite a one off.. it’s actually the poshest place in town pretty much, it does Lavazza coffee, ‘New Zealand Natural’ ice cream, as well as fried chicken served with rice (which is quite a western-style dish I think from a Cambodian viewpoint).
Another oddity is if they are here on work, Cambodian lunch-breaks are generally two hours, so I’d guess they’d squandered their time… the two hours by they way is I think traditionally so you can have a siesta or at least a break from work out of the heat of the hottest sun of the day, many people eat with their families, but in practice it often means people have a little more time to do things like go and work on a second job!
The other thing is that there aren’t many place open today as currently everything is closed for Cambodian new year, so unless their Cambodian counterpart is particularly familiar with the town they’ll be going hungry, plus of course wherever they go they’ll have to wait.
The Cambodian guy with them didn’t say much, but I think he probably sees the Americans as higher ranked than him, either they are his employers or else just more senior in the pecking order.. so it would not have been polite for him to overtly speak out.. in Cambodian terms he most probably gave them all the cues that they were making asses of themselves but I expect they didn’t notice. It was interesting that he still tried to pay, and I have a feeling he gave a mild apology in Khmer as he left, or rather what he said sounded like an explanation in a relatively patient (rather than scolding) tone of voice.
I think this is the quintessential impression many westerners give of themselves in Cambodia, inscrutable and brash.
As of today (9th April) we have been here exactly one month. We’re going out to eat some Khmer food to celebrate later (?!?).
So what’s it like to be 1 month in? Difficult to describe. A big swirl of paradoxical feelings. Have this sense that everything’s normalised too quickly.
In the first few weeks everything felt quite alien, although simultaneously surprisingly familiar, perhaps from having visited Vietnam before, perhaps because in my naivety I kind of expected nothing to work quite the same... does that sound mad? So the fact that you can go and sit in a cafe, and order a fanta (in English) and go back to your hotel room, switch on HBO and watch American movies (yesterday we watched Jo versus the Mountain, which was actually quite entertaining), gives everything this veener of familiarity. Operating in English as well keeps the ground steady under our feet – not forgetting of course that there are two of us, and we’ve made our own little bubble of normal that we walk around in.
So I’m both relieved and disappointed. Everything is strange and yet familiar. I find myself wishing we had gone somewhere that was MORE of a challenge culturally, and yet I know I would feel the same feelings of rapid normalisation there too.
I can’t quite shake this notion that we prepared, or rather we WERE prepared (by VSO), too well. Isn’t an adventure supposed to be full of the unexpected?
And yet I remind myself also that though I may relish the excitement, the ‘experience’ isn’t actually what brought me here. That I came here because I wanted to help in some way, and you look around and it’s undoubtable that help is needed and done right can be useful in a straightforward practical kind of way…
Ok, so here’s some perfect timing, right. Mel’s just interrupted my typing with a case in point (though she’s no idea what I’m typing about): I’m sitting in our favourite bar at the moment, The Mekong Crossing – we call it ‘Joe’s’ after its American co-proprietor. And I’m writing this on my laptop, in fact I’m sipping a lovely banana smoothie in case you’re curious – slightly naughty given one of the ingredients is ice, which you’re supposed to steer clear of. The bar has a great view of the Mekong river, into which (our view that is) a few moments ago a guy just casually strolled, turned his back to us to face the river and urinated. So here’s my point: a few days ago I was jogging along the same path and someone did the same. My reaction? I was mildly appalled, though after a few moments I thought to myself ‘Why not I suppose’. Now it’s happened again and Mel just saw it for her first time. Her reaction: the same as I had. And yet to me it seemed already so commonplace. In fact I found it hard to even recall my own reaction, though it was only a day or two ago.
But here’s the flipside, and it’s paradoxical again. I’m finding that right now while I’m rueing the loss of a certain sense of wonder (and the little tinge of fear and distaste that came with it), the familiarity that’s creeping in is helping me chill out, relax, stop thinking so much about everything I do, and to start to notice and enjoy my surroundings in a way I couldn’t before. So the other day we went on a ride into the countryside on a tuk-tuk, a kind of motorbike-drawn cart, and I started to realise how beautiful I find traditional Khmer houses, which are generally wooden and sit on stilts to keep them from the floods – I remember them from stories my mum told me about Vietnam and Laos growing up.
And today we were walking through the market and I couldn’t help but appreciate the sight of all the fantastic fruit and vegetables and other goods laid out, often just on trays on the floor. They just look fantastic to me.
It’s difficult to explain, but perhaps you understand.
It turns out that a monkey lives in the trees opposite our hotel. He seems quite a civilised sort of chap, sometimes to be seen strolling casually up and down the boulevard, sometimes nibbling pensively on a banana. I hear from a local guide that he is of the banana-eating persuasion. Apparently other monkeys are given to eating much more exotic foodstuffs, such as mango and sugar cane. But not our monkey, he’s just not that kind of monkey.
So I think I’ve had four bank accounts so far – two in the UK, one in GermanyCambodia.
(which may still be open, for all I know!!), and now (fanfare please) one in
Actually I did also have another one with the Co-Operative bank but that doesn’t really count since all I did once it was open was spend the overdraft and never touched it again except to pay the overdraft and close the account.
My first account was with ‘TSB’ for storing my precious £2-a-week pocket-money. And I’m guessing the next account I open will be in laid-back-Australia – where I expect all you have to do is turn up at the bank with a friendly smile and can of Ozzy beer and they’ll give you an account on the spot.. fair dinkum… probably.
One thing you learn quite quickly about the whole process is that it’s much, much harder if you’re a Johnny Foreigner. We’re not trust-worthy you see. Unlike fifteen year old boys (I don’t remember having the slightest difficulty opening my first account!).
In Germany, where the official form and the rubber stamp reign supreme, I had to get a stamped form from both the local authorities and my university to open the account. Sounds straight-forward enough, right? Except that to complete your registration with either, you actually needed forms from the other! Plus the local government office would only deign to let you have such a form if you turned up on the morning of the correct day of the week - and of course the only way of finding out the correct day is to actually visit!
To add to the fun to register with the university I had to queue up a total of FOUR times in the same office. Made both easier and more frustrating by the fact that all the queues were all next to each other. At each window you would collect a new form, and have any you already had decorated with various scribbles and stamps. Then you could proceed to the next queue to go to some other little window to queue up for more of the same.
When I finally reached the bank with the appropriate pieces of paper a rather stern lady directed me to a particular queue in a manner that said ‘well isn’t it obvious?’. Whereupon reaching the front of said queue (and of course collecting a couple of rubber stamp-marks) I was advised I needed to take a few steps across the bank to join a further queue to complete the process!
No blooming wonder Kafka was German!
So after that, I was blithely confident about the process of opening a Cambodian account. After Germany, I reasoned, this is going to be a piece of cake.
Well, I wasn’t quite right.
The first thing I learned, prior to my arrival in Pursat, was that to open the account I needed a letter from my employer, which would be written for me before I arrived to meet my new boss. Except when I arrived it took some fifteen minutes discussion to discover that although initially we were told that the letter was of course written, the actual state of affairs was that the letter had been requested that day. And of course my boss, the director, doesn’t speak English so the letter would subsequently need translation. So I said I would be happy to wait until the next day - seeing as that seemed to be my only option! And that's when the fun really began.
As you will have guessed of course, the letter had in fact not yet been wrtten, so in the course of my meeting with the director the next day he also dictated it out in Khmer, which was translated straight into English. The director also explained that under Cambodian regulations foreigners are not supposed to be able to obtain a bank account until they’ve been in the country for three months. And also no-one could work out the house address, neither my landlord, or landlady knew it - and even my new colleagues (their office is on the same street as our new house) could not even confirm the road name. ‘The bank is going to love this’ I thought to myself, in spite of the assurances that no-one bothers about postal addresses in Cambodia, since your post is delivered to your post office rather than your address.
I should point out that Pursat, where I was to open the account, is a pretty small town. It’s all ramshackle buildings and dust and it takes about five minutes to cycle from one end to the other. It has one bank, and is the home of the one-and-only internet café in the whole province.
So we later merrily headed off to the bank with my passport my official letter and a faint sense of hope that my ‘white’ face would help smoothe things along. Well that last thing at least didn’t quite have the intended effect. Once we got to the front of the queue we were advised that, although apparetnly the lack of address posed no problem, the regulations had been changed and that, seeing as I was a foreigner, we would need an official document certifying my residence in Pursat, which could be obtained from my landlord.
So we jumped on our motorbikes and headed to the workshop of my landlord-to-be. Luckily he was there and listened attentively for the ten or so minutes it seemed to take to explain to him the situation. After a little discussion he explained that he was not able to issue the form himself but that this could be obtained from the village leader so he and a colleague headed off to negotiate this with the village leader. And we were left to sit on some diminutive plastic chairs, and sweat, and chat, and drink the little bottles of complementary water I seemed to have been amassing over the course of the day.
The chairs were of the type Mel has dubbed ‘the national chair of Cambodia’ because they’re absolutely everywhere, every house has some, every school, every business, they litter the streets, the cafes and bars. They’re pretty small, Cambodian’s being a bit shorter anyway, but they also seem to do sitting differently too, they don’t like being too far from the floor – which judging by their chairs may well be because you can never quite trust them to actually hold your weight!
When they returned from their discussions with the Village Leader the news was not fantastic. The village leader had said he could not give me the certificate I needed without first seeing my signed lease agreement. This was a bit of an issue, given the main reason to want to open the account in the first place was so that I could have my deposit transferred, in order to secure said lease on said!
So without the bank account - no lease – but I needed the lease to get the bank account! Stumped!
Thankfully my landlord was willing to break with convention and sign the lease without the money. So with a little sense of dare-devil-ish-ness about us, having broken the rules just a little bit, off we then set to undertake the painstaking process of signing the lease on the house.
Signing your rental agreement in Cambodia is an altogether different affair to what you might expect. Partly you are supposed to negotiate, often extensively, over the price – luckily we had already done that part with the landlady the day before. The women generally being the ones who own businesses – this despite Cambodia being a male-orientated society. That’s a balance that will take a while for me to get my head around!
So all that was left to do was complete the process of going around the place with the landlord negotiating what changes or additions they were willing to make before we moved in. This often takes several hours, but we were in a hurry so managed to get it all wrapped up in just over an hour.
That done, we set for the village administration office to get the certificate the bank needed. As we drew up to the place on our scooters I spied a couple of people who were just leaving who glum-facedly informed us the administration had gone to a workshop. Yes, they were supposed to be there, like we’d been told they would be, but, no, they didn't know where they were or when they'd be back.
It’s actually accepted practice because of the pitifully low wages of officials that they supplement their wages with attending workshops and training, which they are paid extra to attend, and taking bribes.
We tried calling the officials but to no avail. Now what. We sat around helplessly for about ten minutes. I should point out that throughout all of this we were a team of between four and six: myself, a contact from VSO, two office staff from my new workplace, and at various points we were joined the head of finance and at points of course also my landlord. What a hapless posse we must have seemed – six of us, and yet we still coulnd’t manage to get a simple bank account opened. Things were getting frustrating. My mood sank.
Eventually we resolved to go back to the bank and plead with them to let me have the account anyway without the official form.
At the bank the atmosphere among our team was tense, this was our last shot, the culmination of collectively tens of hours of work, hanging on the say-so of a disinterested-looking bank clerk. Initially things looked good, she started tapping away on a keyboard and even got a colleague involved, the two of them conferring and tapping things into their respective computers. But then things took a turn for the worse. She asked again for the form we didn’t have, and when we still couldn’t produce it (where did she think we would magic it from?!?) she tried calling the office of the village leader, perhaps disbelieving of our story – of course she couldn’t get through either and things ground to a hault. She called her boss for advice.
Then a glimmer of hope. Though her boss didn’t seem to be particularly helpful, we could all tell from the tone of her voice that she was on our side. I couldn’t understand a word of course, but I imagined how she was rebutting his objections and deftly parrying his counter-arguments. She seemed to be on the phone for an interminable time, and gave no sign of the state of affairs when she finally put down the receiver. However, a few minutes later came the breakthrough, she asked for my passport, and a colleague turned to me and said ‘It may be possible’. I smiled but didn't want to count my chickens too early.
Sure enough, though, within about ten minutes I was shown an account number. The deed was done!
So after about two and a half hours, five motorbike trips, and having pretty much exhausted all of our patience and ingenuity – we finally succeeded in opening my fourth bank account!
I thanked everyone profusely and even did a bit of back slapping in my excitement.
Actually the story doesn’t quite finish there though, because no more than a few hours later the bank called me saying that they had forgotten to get me to sign one of the forms, so I returned the next day only to find that my signature on the return visit was not sufficiently similar to the day previously. Luckily the clerk was understanding and let me have a few practices until I could get them a bit more uniform and I re-signed everything. Then a few days later while I was on the bus back to the capital, Phnom Penh, I also got word that the original letter from my employer was supposed to have had my passport number on it and that everything was going to go wrong if I didn’t get the number to them immediately. Luckily Mel remembered that my passport number was on my ID card in my wallet, so we managed to get it through to them – and that’s as much as I’ve heard… for now…
