Phnom Penh Blogger Meetup: Sunday August 7, 6:00 pm, at Hurley's Cantina. 347 Sisowath Quay, Phnom Penh, Right next to Sunny.Net. Next door to 'Happy Herb's'. Click for larger image.

Cambodia Blogs (& video & podcasts) in the News (again) Village Girl gets a writeup in the New York Times, in an article on Video Bloggers. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/arts/25vlog.html (registration required, try below:) http://tinyurl.com/bqelq (her husband also does a videoblog, and appears to be doing some work in Cambodia). and Tharum ('Cambodia's Second Most Famous Blogger' gets interviewed at Global Voices. http://tinyurl.com/cxocz Meanwhile, you can hear a local radio interview (105.5 FM) (podcast in Khmer) of members of Youth Council of Cambodia, regarding their work and weblogs. (Caution, big download if you are in Cambodia.) http://khlog.mypodcasts.net/ Video Blogging and podcasting raise some interesting technical challenges. Was in Hurley's Cantina the other night and we were checking out the news. "Cool, video blogs". Hurley starts to download a clip from Village Girl - then realizes that it's 18 megabytes. That's nothing in the developed world, but here if you go over your quota you could be charged a dollar a megabyte, depending on your internet provider. If I want to download something, I go to an internet cafe - they charge by the minute, not by the megabyte. Plus while connections are fast in Phnom Penh, in the provinces they're 128kilobytes per second. A real headache if you're on Hotmail. That's why I try to optimize pictures and pages whenever possible. You never know when there will be a power outage or the internet will suddenly become... slow, for no apparent reason at all.

A day at the 'Department of Comics'

Friday July 22 8am

Artist and teacher Y Lida shows up at our office with the final page of the Heritage Watch comic.

The staff have been going all out with the translation of the comic. The story was written by Dougald O'Reilly. At the October 2004 Exposition, he met up with Lida and a partnership was born.

Dougald read comics as a kid so he is no stranger to the medium. Very pleased he left superheroes aside to concentrate on a story that fleshes out the background to antiquities theft here. The whole office (Prak Virek, Chey Sereyvath, Huy Samphors and Khieu Kenvich) pitched in with the translation, which was a whale of a job. (Do the protagonists speak countryside Khmer or more formal speech?)

I've been helping in little ways - reviewing the dialogue with Dougald, checking in with Lida, talking to Sereyvath about word balloon placement. This can be one of the trickier aspects of Khmer comics: rinted Khmer tends to run longer and needs wider line breaks due to subscripts and superscripts. (When doing my own comics I tend to write the Khmer version first, then insert English and French.)

So now we're in lettering and design phase, Dougald has come up with a good cover design and logo. (How he manages to do this with a day job on the side, I'll never know.) The whole office has pitched in to arrange meetings, review and scan art, provide background information. It's good team effort, and they'll get to show off their work at the launch.

Working title is Grave Robbers and the Phantom Army.

Feel like we're over the hump now that we have the story pages in the can. The comic will be distributed free to Cambodians and an English language version will be sold to foreigners to help defray the cost. Friends of Khmer Culture has helped front-load the process by adding some support of their own. Launch and exhibition in Siem Reap, this October. Just in time for Lire en Fete 2005!

9:00am

Piseth and I look over our growing list of historic comics from a private collection. We are preparing a draft translation of the titles so we can prepare an archiving project. With the extra Uth Roeun and Hul Sophon comics, there might be the possibility of an academic paper on pre-revolutionary comics.

And the 1980s era comic books are a real time capsule. Printing houses have names like 'Revolutionary Girl Printing House' or 'Karl Marx Printing House'. Parallel world socialist romance. Far out.

Piseth and I review some notes on Em Satya's 80 page unpublished comic, something we discovered last year and have been trying to figure out a plan for ever since. SIPAR editor Lim Santapheap has given us some comments on the story flow. Looks like this story is not quite ready for publication yet, it will take some more editing.

We then tackle a draft English/Khmer Curriculum Vitae 'CV' example for this evening's meeting at the Cambodian Book Sector Federation.

Kyle's phone isn't working. I ask Piseth to check if Kyle is at his home, he returns from Australia today. Aha! I zip over to his place to borrow his digital video camera. I want to start building an archive of video tapes of comic artists. (Plus I can compensate Kyle in beer.)

12:00

Kyle is exhausted and has a pile of dinky-di Aussie trinkets for me, plus tales from the two academic meetings he went to. He went with Heng Piphal and Hang Sophady, the only two Cambodian scholars at these largely Cambodia-centric affairs.

Sounds like the meetings went really well. It was the first time Pipol and Sophady had seen snow or kangaroos. The descriptions made me a bit homesick for Australia.

On the way back I stop over at the French Cultural Center's Carnets d'Asie bookshop, They’ve got Simon Hureau's new book, Bureau des Prolongations. At the end of Simon's first Cambodia comic, 'Palaces', he lost his passport. This one picks up where he left off, and really captures an individual perspective on Cambodia. (His characters speak Khmer but in wobbly handwritten script, which is a good way to indicate a language you're not fluent in.) $30 cover price though, ouch! Will probably wait a while to buy it. (You however can see a fair bit of it online.) Writeup: http://www.benzinemag.net/bd/bureau_prolongations.htm Review: http://www.leportillon.com/article.php3?id_article=803 Profile: http://www.bedetheque.com/index.php?A=8049 Samples and more. http://www.ego-comme-x.com/article.php3?id_article=309 3:00 pm On the way back I run into an architect friend from Siem Reap, Julian. One curious fact about Cambodia: it is SWARMING with architects. Studying temples, helping with infrastructure, building new developments. (There is a building boom on in Phnom Penh, whether it's a bubble economy or not, we will see.)

I invite Julian to the art auction this Sunday and ask him for some tips on an animator. Most architects know 3D modelling programs and animation is not so far away. I'm trying to do an inventory of people who have these skills so we can set up a future project.

Draft an email to Lisa Mandel in Battambang. I hope she is taking some pictures to record her trip. I hope to go up and visit next weekend!

4:00 pm

Getting ready for comics meeting. Surprise, Adam stops by. A friend from my early days in Phnom Penh: he's looking for one of the 'Danger Mimes' t-shirts Dougald sells to raise money for Heritage Watch, before he heads back to Afghanistan. (You can get them locally at Fantastic Planet or the Boom Boom Room. ) I ask him to try to find out what's up with Pangolin.

Bureau des Prolongations? Today it seems like the Bureau des Bande Dessinee - department of comics. Not that I mind.

5:00 pm Meeting at Cambodia Book Sector Federation: 'Special Interest Group on Comics'. Many of the members are Y Lida's students. We've heard no news back from the Korean festival that had asked us for Khmer candiates to invite. We discuss a few plans for our Indonesia-Cambodia exchange in October.

Today we're talking about portfolios: how to make one and how to write a CV. In my mind this is the biggest limitation that most artists face: they have the skills but don't know how to professionally present themselves.

I distribute photocopies of the Khmer/English CV to help explain how to write a simple artist CV. While the Federation's Coordinator Rattana helps translate my clunky Khmer I do a bit of filming of the group. I was hoping to do an interview of Soeung Makara or Or Yuthea but neither of them have come this time. It's good to have footage on file though, it can be used for any number of things.

The CVs take more time than I thought, it's a real process to develop one for the first time. Some of the artists have them, some need to make one. At the end of the meeting I ask for volunteers: who wants to try to make a portfolio?

I hand out seven $1 notebooks. Next month we'll see who comes back with their CV and art. I already have scanned and put some sample art online but it needs to be organized into artist pages.

Chan Nawath (art teacher at Mit Samlanh) has brought a friend and wants to discuss animation training. Still, animation is not the role of the Book Sector Federation, but maybe we can find a way for one of our visitors to speak about it. Most visual artists here are interested in getting some training, but we have to find a vehicle.

7:30 pm Rattana and I discuss the application for funding we've got to develop. (Hopefully we can include some money for our upcoming 'Komik Cambodia' exchange - this time for a Cambodian to visit Indonesia. That would rock.)

The Federation also could do with some volunteers to help out with the paperwork. Looks like there are plenty of college students who would be interested. Maybe we should place an advertisement, to be thorough.

8:00 pm Drop off comics gear and go to an internet cafe to check email. I'm curious to hear if there's been any word from Melbourne about their Animation nite. The Australians have set up a comics wiki and I'm thinking I may just do the same for Cambodian artists. Meanwhile, I find the Cambodia blog frenzy is still bouncing emails around the globe.

After two hours in the cafe I get netburn. Enough emails for now. Busy day so I go home and konk out.

Cinematique Anonymous meeting 21 JULY 05 With the return of KM Lo to Phnom Penh, it's time for another 'Cinematique Anonymous' meeting, this time held at the new Peace Cafe. Some amusement as we try to track down the new place, which has the same house number as the hotel next door to boot! For several years now KM Lo has been doing some very basic 'Do It Yourself' (DIY) film teaching. Many of his former and current students showed up, as well as a trio of interested French film fans and yours truly. KM now has a web site that can feature various forms of media with his comments. Today he's talking about (DIY) 'Do It Yourself' cinema, showing a film about a small chinese village where one DV camera led to a creative explosion of home made films. Recommended reading: Filmmaking in 10 minutes: http://www.exposure.co.uk/makers/minute.html Filmmaking in Zero minutes! http://www.kamiasroad.com/khavn/zero.html Next meeting will be in three months, and if there is something sooner I'll pass it on.

 

July 22 (Today!) to August 21

Douglas P. Baulos, Matthew Posey, Linda Saphan, " & ", FCC Siem Reap, Cambodia.

 

http://www.saklapel.org/events/

http://www.fcccambodia.com/

Barang cheh Kmai

is a phrase that follows me around, it means 'french knows khmer'. Any foreigner who looks to be of European extraction is called 'barang' so even though my French skills are terrible, by default I am a 'barang'. (This gives much amusement to my French friends here.)

It can be fun to hear people talking about me when they don't think I understand. ("He's skinny." "What's he doing?")

If you've ever wanted to be famous, being a foreigner in Cambodia can cure you of that. You are conspicuous everywhere you go, especially when you have red hair. My friends from Peru and the Philippines almost blend in! When I returned to visit the States, I got on the train at one point and was amazed - nobody looked at me! I was completely anonymous!

I went into a restaurant the other day near my house, a small place that didn't have a menu. The staff quickly told me 'No have food you can eat.' (Maybe they thought I'm allergic to rice?)

I quietly asked them about the food the other customers were eating. Suddenly the whole restaurant stopped talking to listen, and comment 'cheh Kmai'. I listed a few types of food that I thought they might have - 'lok lak', 'bay chaa' and the staff were relieved. I think the best way to get past the language barrier is to be polite and patient. If you raise your voice or are in a hurry, it doesn't help.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Upcoming events: OK folks, don't forget: Cinematique Anonymous meeting tonight, Comics meeting Friday, and Art Auction at Java Cafe this weekend!

Think Global, Blog Local An article in Wired (by Matt Reed, writer of the Cambodia Daily article last week) brings yet more attention to the Cambodian 'blogosphere'. [courtesy Khmerang.com] http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68224,00.html Pundits weigh in here, here ,and here. Blogger Buzz tags it as well. Hope Global Voices doesn't mind if I excerpt one of their recent articles:

Our friends in Cambodia have been letting us know about an explosion of excellent Cambodian blogs, in English, French and Khmer. One of the most widely linked is King Norodom Sihanouk's website. It's not quite a blog - no RSS feed, for one thing - but the "daily documents" section is organized in reverse-chronological order and looks like a blog to me. There's even a photoblog of sorts - a record of His Majesty's daily activities in pictures. HM is evidently quite a music fan - many of the posts reference compositions or dances in his honor, and there's a collection of songs performed by the king available for streaming by Windows Media users.

I'm taking a wild guess that the folks at Cam-Blog are Global Voices fans. Their motto sounds a little familiar: "For All Friends! The World is Reading, are You Ready to Write?" The twelve authors listed on the group blog are, providing news and pictures from around the country, as well as a useful list of "Clogs", Cambodian weblogs.

Representing Cambodian youth overseas (and at home) are the Khmer-Girlz and Khmer-Boyz blogs, which index profiles and links of young Cambodian bloggers, especially in France, but also throughout the world.

I've added ThaRum, a prolific and articulate Phnom Penh writer, to my aggregator. His recent post on the importance of local content in Khmer is very much worth reading.

[read more: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/2005/07/15/voices-from-the-wiki/] Actually, the blogs are already here - we've never made an effort to just sit down and count them. In another month I think the listing will double. We'll know Cambodia blogs are really effective when there are more blogs in Khmer. (It's an interesting technical challenge.) The 'roundups' (summaries) at Global Voices and other sites are usually by people who don't know Khmer. What will happen to international coverage then? I guess the blogs that are in French and English (Spanish?) will be seen as 'bridge blogs' - weblogs that connect to the international community. Might be a good idea to have another blog evening. Who would have thought a few burritos at Hurley's Cantina could lead to such a media frenzy? Well, now that the world's watching, I'll have to try to think of something interesting to say. Tags: Cambodia Blog

Khmer Architecture Tour This last weekend I took a look at the Tonle Bassac community, and buildings nearby it including the burnt-out National Theatre. The visits are done by Khmer Architecture Tours, which highlight the 60s and 70s architecture that is so unique in Cambodia. http://www.ka-tours.org Want a look? Here's my photos. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jinja_cambodia/sets/597128/ And drop KA-Tours an email if you want to see for yourself. It's fascinating to think how these styles would have evolved further, if history had taken a different turn. Even burnt out, run down, and falling apart, it's like walking into a different world. (Our earlier 'Mystery Photo' was a closeup of a ventilation grille at the theatre. ) Below: grafitti inside the Theatre. (Postscript: via del.icio.us, discovered a link to some more architecture photos. http://www.johncaserta.com/khmerarch/)

A fair number of emails floating around sparked by this quote: "There's no Starbucks."

A quick post: two sites recommended by a friend,

Mystery Photo What do you see? A series of tiny windows? An abstract art project? Cooling fins on an alien spaceship? I'll reprint some of the best guesses. Click on 'link' below to add a comment.

Cambodia Blogger Meetup Forgot my 'Moto Taxi' cap! But people found each other anyway at our first ever Cambodia Blogger Pub Night. The Phnom Penh came two hours early and sorted Cantina's Wi-Fi connection. Tharum spotted me from my photo. Kampuchea Crossings completely forgot but wandered by for food. Left to right: Kampuchea Crossings,The Phnom Penh,Tharum,Jinja. We were dive-bombed by little grasshoppers; summer is upon us. But it was a fairly cool evening, it's been cool all week. Great to meet everyone, we compared notes on how we do that thing we do. Tharum works in IT and has plenty of technical skills. He wants to make it easier for Cambodians to do blogs, and is keen on a portal site for newbie Camboside bloggers. The Phnom Penh thinks that unicode Khmer fonts are the way forward. I suggested we have a little 'Cambodia Blogs' button for our sidebars. (Probably 'Global Voices' too.) And we all concurred that there should be some directory for our growing list of Cambodia weblogs - maybe a wiki page. It's good to see all these blogs starting up in the provinces... the big question is, will they continue? I'm estimating the number of in-Cambodia weblogs at 50 and rising. I haven't even checked LiveJournal's listings yet, we are just getting started! Many regional blogs are coming out of the Cambodia Community Information Centers (CICs). They are also developing regional portals and are proving to be a valuable resource. Will they eventually become self-supporting? NGO funding is OK for now, but won't last forever. Time will tell. We also had some paeleobloggers ('dead tree bloggers' quoth bar proprietor Hurley): the Phnom Penh Post and Cambodia Daily. They weren't there specifically for the story, just hanging out because Hurley's Cantina is crossroads of the world. Both were interested to get a general understanding of our motivations and aspirations. Not sure how articulate I/we were, we are still just figuring things out! I think that it would be a real accomplishment to see a regular weblog in a Khmer font - from Cambodia. (Wanna's already given it a shot.) However, there are advantages to English - Tharum is being interviewed by the Cambodia Daily and they would never have discovered him if it wasn't for him writing in a second language. Is the Cambodian Blogosphere "poised to explode"? Well, it was really just four people meeting in a pub. But it was fun and we'll do it again. And who knows what'll come in the future? ******************************************* Postscript: The Phnom Penh's Notes on blogger meetup: http://thephnompenh.blogspot.com/2005/07/cambodia-bloggers.html Cambodia4Kids has some techie tips: http://beth.typepad.com/cambodia4kidsorg/2005/07/the_first_cambo.html Global Voices Wiki Page. Blogs ahoy! http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/dyn/globalvoices/wiki/index.php/Cambodia Where's this regional blog training coming from? Aha. http://www.iri.org/progweeklysummary.asp?id=4561230337 P.S. btw If you're looking for art updates you often see here, a lot of the announcements and press releases - (Java Arts, French Cultural Centre, Sovanna Phum, etc.) I'm forwarding directly to 'What's On', a dedicated blog for Khmer arts info. French, English, Khmer all welcome.

Murals and Messages This HIV awareness mural is on the side of one of the Tonle Bassac buildings, designed by Vann Molyvann. (The building, not the mural.) It's an interesting view of the intersection between international efforts and local art. I can't help but wonder - if I had a giant HIV awareness painting on the side of my home, what would people think I'm up to inside? Cambodia has scores of murals about HIV, mine awareness, ecology, and more. Some are kitsch, some are poignant. Nearly all are foreign funded. It's a specific kind of art that's been around since the 1980's, and will probably evaporate in the next ten years or so. Take pictures while you can. Alas, Tonle Bassac area is in the throes of development. Thanks to Khmer Architecture Tours, I was able to get a walk-through of this area and the nearby national theatre. Pictures to follow once I've sorted them. http://www.ka-tours.org

Drop the Mahout, I'm the easy rider* Gratuitous elephant photo, every blog needs one. I love the smile on the street vendor's face. (Click for closeup). Lots underway. Blogger meetup @ Hurley's Cantina Sunday, Khmer Architecture Tours this weekend Monash Temple conference next week!

Tube and Time It was from my former boss Mark that I heard the news. Mark headed up ACE school in Siem Reap and had moved on, with his family, to London. If he'd stayed, his kids would likely have studied at the international school that was all over the news during the recent hostage crisis. Now he's working an admin job in London, and I can only imagine his thoughts, and those of his friends. Is anywhere on this planet safe? We are all waiting for our friends to check in, to see who is OK. Doubtless there will be comparisons to 9-11. What was once routine commuting has suddenly become something worse. How is it possible for everyday life to segue into something so horrible? In an attempt to come to grips with the horrors revealed after Auschwitz, critic and essayist George Steiner suggested the distinctions of 'good time' and inhuman 'bad time'. Margaret Drabble applied these terms to Cambodia in her novel ' The Gates of Ivory'. More recently Geoff Ryman's 253 utilized the immediacy of a tube train wreck as a structural backdrop to illuminate ordinary life's fine grain. Studying Cambodia often shows the incongruous adjacency of 'good time' and 'bad time'. Many of my Khmer friends share my ideas, opinions and outlook, but arrived at them via a radically differerent (and difficult) path through the period labeled 'the Killing Fields'. I'm amazed and inspired that they can move through and past such experiences to create new lives for themselves. And I'm constantly conscious that even though the Khmer Rouge time is over, poverty, crime and corruption destroy dreams and lives on a daily basis, if you care to look. My heroes are those who work on the front lines: to protect children, to give sex workers control over their lives, to help people who are trapped in debt to find a way out, to create places where creativity can flourish safe from fear. They build schools and libraries, homes, hospitals, hospices and orphanages. There's a high burnout rate; they face a daily uphill slog through mountains of paperwork and bureaucracy, encountering indifference and outright opposition. But somehow, they keep moving along, day after day. Part of our horror at the tube bombings, at the Spanish train bombings, at 9-11 is the realization that 'good time' and 'bad time' are adjacent and overlapping. I didn't really have a personal grip on Trade Center's destruction until I walked the full circuit around ground zero, one month after the attack. Photos and handwritten testemonials were put up daily: stories and pictures of utterly ordinary people doing utterly ordinary things. A woman playing with a cat. An investment banker on skis. Someone had written the lyrics to a really bad pop song as a eulogy, and it hit me: That's too kitsch to be fake. This person really died. When you know that horror is just a step away from the humdrum, it's only human to begin asking questions. How could such things happen? How could we let them happen? How could we have stopped it? How do we unravel the chaos of the present back to the malignant seeds sown in the past? The important thing is to let these questions rise to the surface of our thinking. It's a good thing to have the curiosity and the courage to examine what is horrible and wrong. Asking why reaffirms our humanity. The threads history is woven of lead to different places, and people often arrive at different answers. What matters most is that we make the attempt. Turning away would make us complicit, to a small degree. It's easy to become wrapped up the warp and woof of daily routine; sending email, washing dishes, doing the laundry, commuting to work. Enduring or enjoying little moments that may exasperate or inspire us. Yet it's in this often banal sphere that we have the power to push back the 'banality of evil'. By voting. By writing. By reading. By teaching. By learning. By protesting. By creating. By doing what is right, in your eyes, to repair crimes of the past or to prevent those of the future. And by doing this work we may find the clouds part from time to time, not to reveal 'bad time' but moments of enlightenment and illumination. Tags: London terrorism Cambodia

More Music Beyond Cambodian karaoke and power pop, if you look you can find some good stuff. Here's what I've been listening to. "Krom Skor" translates as "Group Drum". Sovanna Phum has been hosting a drumming group for many months now, it must be over a year at least. Now they have recorded their own CD and are selling it for 5 bucks at their store in Phnom Penh. Sovanna Phum has been collaborating with international arts groups and performers for many years, and are getting pretty good skills in sharing and innovating with Khmer music while at the same time, retaining their knowledge of traditional culture. Click here for credits and track listing. And the Khmer Fusion Project (Jazz and traditional musicians) have added a few more MP3s to their site. Give them a listen, I have yet to find someone who doesn't like this CD. (You can order via credit card!) http://www.khmerfusion.com

Beaucoup des BD A welcome visit from French cartoonist Lisa Mandel, who is passing through Phnom Penh to discuss printing plans for a comics workshop at Battambang's Phare Art school. If you're one of the tiny handful of people who read this blog regularly, you'll remember Lisa was one of the artists from 'Sept Mois au Cambodge' (Seven Months in Cambodia). She and her friend Saneesh (hope I spelled that right) are thinking of a side trip to Kracheh. But first we've got to figure out the cost and sizing of the comic, and make a few much overdue Phnom Penh connections. I finally get to introduce her to the French Cultural Centre folks, they are a very suppportive crowd. She is full of plans and ideas. I'm happy to oblige with local comics and info about what's happening locally. Here's Lisa uploading a story for her publisher in France. Lots of discussion about French comics, Khmer comics, Anglophone comics and the gaps between. It's great to chat comics practice and theory with someone equally (if not more) enthused. We do a bit of searching around - maps, translators, language books. It's great that I can understand a little French, Lisa and Saneesh don't feel obliged to speak English all the time. ( Lisa's Khmer is starting to come back. Cool!) I'm still terrible at spoken French but one must continue, step by step. Lisa suggests I visit France for some proper practice. I'm game, I'll just have to figure out a good excuse to visit. Strasbourg, Angouleme, Marseilles - oh yeah. With luck we may be able to have her visit the Cambodia Book Federation's 'Special Interest Group' on comics, more to follow!

Cambodge en Francais

Probably one of the most popular pop singers in Cambodia is Preap Sovath. Like most pop singers, in addition to his own work he often adapts songs that are popular from overseas - China, Korea, whatever works. 'Careless Whisper' in Khmer? That was him. (Issues of royalties I will leave to the World Trade Organization.) Here he is advising his pal to "Kick out your girl friend". (Literally, 'sweetheart' ('sangsaa')) so it could apply to either gender. Foreigners love the used Vespas that you can find in Phnom Penh. The appearance of a swanky refurbished one in the video popularized it - to the amusement of my friend Emiko who'd had one for over a year before. Suddenly it was cool. Following the recent tunes 'Sexy Boy' and 'Sexy Lady' comes 'Sexy Lady'. A weird guy follows a wealthly lady around the malls and restaurants of Phnom Penh. I was in a CD shop when they played this video, and the staff and customers were just busting a gut laughing. I couldn't figure out what was so funny about it until I realized underneath the big afro style hair and sunglasses was .... that wacky Preap Sovath! Virtually a novelty record, it's a welcome break from the 'broken-heart-walking-in-the-garden' style of Karaoke you get here. Beyond karaoke, there's lots more to be had. Tomorrow: Khmer Fusion music.

 

Cambodia Yellow pages is holding an auction for charity - more at

Already getting some press: Global Voices, local bloggers. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/?p=278

Good Luck to You Good luck charms abound in Cambodia. Many shops have small card-sized ones on their counter. Here's one from near my apartment. And here's a curious one - a two dollar bill with symbols inscribed on it. Some 'dollarized' countries like Cambodia have a hard time accepting that two dollar bills actually exist as legal currency. Paper money has no intrinsic value; you have to believe in it. This takes belief to a new level, perhaps.... And while on things visual: Lisa Mandel hits Battambang and Phnom Penh this weekend! Stay Tooned.

(Now if only we could do weblogs in Khmer language...)

. . .