Shopping, shopping... and the first batch of cat food!

As I walked down to the Russian Market this morning, I happened to see a young woman menacing a tuk-tuk driver with a stainless steel meat cleaver.  I thought briefly of intervening, not so much to save the driver, but because it was a really good-looking meat cleaver, and that was one of the items on my shopping list. This particular woman, however, did not look even slightly inclined to surrender her cleaver, so I left them to settle their dispute.

My list included a few household supplies...

• wheeled mop bucket
• 2 stainless steel mixing bowls
• meat cleaver 
• cutting board

... and some of the necessary ingredients for the cat food, like chicken livers and chicken hearts.  

The best price I could get out of the supplies' seller (the same lady who sold me the grinder) was $33 for the whole lot, and the chicken lady quoted me $9/kg for hearts and livers, but she didn't have the hearts in stock. These prices all struck me as high, but they didn't seem inclined to bargain, even when I walked away. 

I came home empty-handed and rang up Visna, the tuk-tuk driver.  We went to Lucky Supermarket in BKK1, the more posh expat area.  I came away with the household supplies for $28, and all are of better quality than in the Russian Market.  Better still, I found packets of chicken livers and hearts for $5.90/kg there -- my only gripe with them is that they come on polystyrene trays.  

I think the covered markets can be effective places to shop for the locals, because they are in better positions to negotiate -- they know the going price on all these items.  When I can find better quality housewares at a lower price in a supermarket, I know I'm being royally ripped off in the Russian Market. When my sense of standard prices improves, and when my Khmer improves, I may try the covered markets again, but meanwhile, life is less stressful and more economical at Lucky.  

Lucky Supermarket is also the only place in the city, as far as I've seen, that sells cat litter. Not a thrilling purchase, but a necessary one.

I came home with all the ingredients -- the chicken livers and hearts, a whole dressed duck, and a small packet of ground beef (simply because my cats aren't all that keen on poultry).  After some fussing with the meat grinder -- finding a place to fasten it securely, figuring out how the blades and extruder are supposed to go together -- I am pleased to report that I've made my first batch of raw cat food, and Crumpet at least has been nibbling at it.  I would also like to report the following:  It's messy work, and revolting for a squeamish vegetarian.  Rubber gloves are now on my shopping list. On the other hand, it's gratifying in an evil sort of way to hack things up with a meat cleaver. I had to summon a fair bit of courage to lop the first foot off the duck, but by decapitation time, I was swinging that cleaver like Henry VIII's executioner. And once I had it put together correctly, the grinder had no problem munching up all the duck bones. 

We're quite a way from making a business out of this, but I'll be really pleased if my two cats will give it their seal of approval.  

A Shameless Bid..., Part 2

Ee Lynn, Aravind and Rose, look!

Cambodia Law Firm.  Can't get much more straightforward than that, as far as names go. I doubt Cambodian law is straightforward, but that's all the fun!  And look at all the scaffolding -- they're expanding. Best of all, this is a block away from the 2Hands blind massage centre, and just a wee bit farther from the Sesame Noodle Bar.  Pack up your law degrees and come instill justice in the Phenomenal Penguin. 

2Hands, Part 2

I stopped in at the new blind massage place this afternoon.

It breaks my heart to say this, but it puts KL's blind massage centres -- even the best of them -- to shame.

The level of massage training in KL over the years has been in steady decline. Recent graduates are little more than automatons. They go through a memorised routine, which they don't vary to accommodate people's pain tolerance, injuries, preferences or needs. Most of them can't speak or understand enough English to work with non-Malay speakers -- they don't have the vocabulary for body parts, or 'Is the pressure ok?' or 'Why are you screaming when I rearrange your neck?'

In contrast, nearly all of the Cambodian masseurs I've encountered can speak at least the important bits of English and are generally more skilled at their work.  And this place, true to the manager's word, is a step above the others. She won't hire a masseur that doesn't have at least five years' experience, and she gives them work according to their strengths. If this one hasn't proven that he can give excellent foot massage, he will never touch a client's feet.  The manager actually asked me about my needs and preferences -- any injury or illness, for example? -- before she introduced me to the masseuse.  I've never experienced that in Malaysia.

These are the chairs for foot and head/neck massage. Never mind about the splashy upholstery, do you see the openings in the back for your face?  This is proper massage furniture!

'

The beds for the full-body massage are in another room, also very purple in nature.  I had the one hour shiatsu massage, and my masseuse was Srey Pich.  (Pich means "diamond", which in her case is very apt.) 

Here's the full menu and price list. It's far less than half the going rate in KL for a much better experience.

I took a handful of the 2Hands flyers and will pass them out to everyone I meet whom I think will give the place some business.  And to all my friends who either do or did patronise the blind massage centres in Brickfields, come up and give this place a try!  

The Sesame Noodle Bar

I'm not a food blogger, and I have no intention of cluttering up this blog with incompetently written culinary reviews, but this place, around the corner from the Russian Market, just rocks.  

Entry requirements are made plain.

 

They like large pieces of cow art. (Brien, we're in good company here!) 

They also have a fair amount of cat art, and as I glanced over at the bar, I noticed a slightly out-of-place feline draped over it. Hey, look at the classic Turkish tulip design on that porcelain!

Then I looked farther down the bar where the bottles were lined up, and what an eclectic mix it was!  But right at the end of the line, under the Turkish cat's watchful (or not so watchful) gaze was this.

Turcophiles will recognise this at once.  Raki is the Turkish equivalent of Ouzo -- a potent, anise-flavoured spirit.  I said something to the waitress about Turkey, and she immediately called to the owner, not understanding what I was asking. The owner is an American fellow, about my age, who just visited Istanbul recently with his Japanese wife. They came back to PP with the Iznik cat, the Yeni Raki, and now that I look at this photo more closely, what looks like a meerschaum pipe on a stand.  Markku, you and I once agreed that raki just doesn't taste right outside of Turkey. What do you think -- would you order a shot in Phnom Penh?

Oh, right, the Sesame Noodle Bar is in fact a restaurant, and I ordered a bowl of the house sesame noodles. To. die. for.  Loads of veggies, boiled egg, tofu, icy cold green noodles and a sublime sesame sauce for $3.75.  Their house wines are $3/glass, less at happy hour. They also have pork for the carnivores. I'll be haunting this place, I think.

A Shameless Bid to Lure Loved Ones to Phnom Penh, Part 1

Markku, since Putin will quite likely march onward from the Crimea to Finland, why not just pack it up and come to Cambodia (which is hardly a candidate for Russian annexation)?  You could draw maps, I know you could!

...or pour pints for Finnish tourists while their clothes are being washed. Lots of sloshing opportunities here.

Vinca, forget Geneva!  Who would want to live in Switzerland when you could live and work in Cambodia? The WHO office is, quite appropriately I think, on Street 51, AKA Rue de Pasteur.

Kristen, stop fussing about those high shop rents in Boston.  Here in Phnom Penh, we have al fresco barbering.

Charlene, I'll have my bamboo bicycle in a few weeks, I hope, but you can always come here and find work doing the more traditional type of coffin transport.

Is your name not on this post?  Patience, patience -- there's a place for each of you in the Phenomenal Penguin, and given time, I'll find them all!  

Commerce

Today, I decided, will be bamboo bicycle day.  Fate decided otherwise, but it was a good walk to the shop and back.

Cart vendors are becoming an endangered species in KL, but they're everywhere in PP. I remember my friend Allison describing someone as being too old to buy green bananas. This banana man has it covered -- green, yellow, red, in all sizes and shapes.  (Another vendor sells roasted bananas from his pushcart, but I didn't get a photo of him, and his bananas aren't very photogenic, though they do smell wonderful.)

Here's a more prosperous, motorised banana man.

I took this photo for the yellow-blooming tree, and it just happened there was a coconut vendor beneath it. I don't know what species the tree is, but this one and its relatives are blooming profusely all over the city.

The classic cyclo, or bicycle rickshaw, is still in business here, too. A fleet of them work the riverfront, catering to tourists who think this is a fine way to see the city (and it is!), but they work elsewhere as well. Especially the older Cambodian ladies tend to take them home from the markets, which is what the lady in this one was doing. Notice the grey pullcarts on the side of the street.  Their owners will pull them here or there, and then open them to sell snacks and drinks. Some of them will stay in one spot, say outside a school or business, and others will haul them up and down streets, calling out or blowing small horns to attract business.

Outside a construction site is a lucrative place to bring such carts.  Note the scaffolding on these two new "high rise" apartments -- bamboo!

They seem to have well-dressed cattle down under. I had no idea.

I was really pleased to see three different organic local veggie stores along Street 63.  When I get that elusive bicycle, they'll be more easily accessible, and their prices are not at all exorbitant.

When I finally got to the shop that's selling the bamboo bicycles, it was closed. No sign, no explanation.  It's normally open seven days a week, so perhaps there was a special event.  I saw through the window that they don't have the frame that I want in stock, so they'll have to order it from Hanoi, where the bikes are made.  Looks like it will be a few weeks before I'm on wheels.

Postal address?

Several friends have asked me to send them my new postal address.  Sorry, folks, but at the moment, I can't.  From everything I've heard and read, mail sent to the house address will never arrive.

I know Stephen Hawking now says black holes do not exist,
but Bermuda Triangle comparisons are not in good taste these days.

None of the houses have post boxes. I've never seen a mailman (or at least no one recognisable as such). A friend who lives in a posh serviced apartment attached to a boutique hotel says he has received mail there, but that's not my situation.

The general advice is to rent a PO box, which increases the odds of receiving mail. (Note, I did not say receipt is guaranteed, or even pretty damned likely.)  My only reservation with this plan is that the nearest PO branch is halfway across town in a hectic neighbourhood, near the Olympic Stadium.  There's no point in renting a post box if I'm only going to drag myself over there to check it once a month.

Give me a few weeks, and I'll figure out what to do about snail-mail.

2Hands

Rose, this post's for you:

I discovered a new blind massage centre nearby.  No monkey business in this establishment. And check out the price.

The only thing that seems indecent about it is the 20% Grand Opening discount.  I hope the patrons all tip very generously!

Day Two

On Wednesday night, I sat down on the sofa and felt a wave of despair.  I had not yet managed to establish a diverse circle of friends, my Khmer was scarcely any better,  the raw cat food business was still no more than an idea, I hadn't got the bamboo bike or opened a bank account or joined up to volunteer at The Flicks.

Then it dawned on me that I'd been in Phnom Penh (as a resident) for all of 28 hours.  I put the scourge down on the coffee table and tossed the hair shirt aside.

Thursday, 27 March, was my second full day, and now, as the sun sets, I will toast the day with a glass of Soju instead of beating myself up.

The lady at Acleda Bank told me yesterday that she needs to see a rental contract "with a stamp from the authority".  What authority, what sort of stamp?  I rang up Realtor Benny yesterday afternoon to ask about this, and he suggested that he'd like to come over to see me this morning.  He arrived on his little motorbike with his two colleagues, Jacky and Hari, on the back.  (Had I mentioned that this is not a high-end Realty?) They came up to the balcony with Yee, my landlady, in tow and explained to her where the contracts must go for this official stamp.  Her son will see to it in the next day or two, and then I can open the bank account. Not an insuperable obstacle after all, and the Dragon Realtors went home with a big bag of green mangoes, which Yee picked for them with her long-handled bamboo mango-picking tool.  I'll get a photo of that soon. It's ingenious!

I have the whole upper storey of the house -- 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, enormous balcony and the rooftop terrace.  I realised only today that the ground floor is split in half.  Yee occupies one half, which she shares with her elderly and ailing husband, her adult son Sopheak, and her adult daughter Serai, who has very profound Down's syndrome.  My heart aches for Yee, and I'm really pleased that Sopheak takes such good care of his parents.  She told the realtors that she wished he would marry, but I don't know how she could manage without him.  Yes, yes -- I'll get photos of them all, sooner or later.

The other half of the ground floor is rented out to a couple in their 30s (?), Paul and Amanda.  I met Amanda this morning. CLICK! We got on famously.  I nearly swooned when she said, "Please, you must tell me if my music disturbs you -- I'm a classical pianist." She composes sort of new age music, she said, but I told her that I'd be overjoyed to hear her banging out Shostakovich or Stravinsky.  Anything, anything at all.

Now I do feel decadent about being one person occupying so much space, given that there are 6 in the same amount of space below (actually less, because my balcony protrudes from the front of the house).  I told Amanda and the realtors, all of whom remarked that it does seem like a large space for one woman, that I expect to be deluged with guests.  Don't make a liar out of me, people.

After meeting Amanda, I went down to the Russian Market.  One day when I don't have a long shopping list, I will go down there with a camera.  I've seen covered markets all over Asia, but this one is something else again.  Today I picked up my odds and ends -- some lightweight cotton shifts to wear around the house, cleaning supplies, fruit, bread.  Then I found the "housewares department".  I found what looked like a very well-stocked stall and began.  In a broken mixture of English and Khmer and sign language, I did my best to describe a manual meat grinder. The saleslady produced a blender.  Ok, it's a start.  I mimed working the handle of the meat grinder, and she offered me a stool. She returned with another woman who spoke some English. They gestured to me that I should remain on the stool and vanished into the bowels of the market.

Mind you, it's a thoroughly Cambodian market -- the name refers to the fact that there used to be a lot of Russians living in this area in years past, and it was their favourite place to shop and trade.  My saleslady returned with two models of precisely what I'd been looking for:  heavy steel manual grinders that attach to the edge of the counter.  Her friend said, "This one made in Vietnam.  Quality not good. This one is Soviet! Very, very good."

I took both of them completely apart, examining the screw, the blades, the extruder, and I had to agree -- the Russian grinder was much superior to the Vietnamese one.

So my raw cat food business doesn't yet have a name, but we do have our first grinder.  I bargained her down to $43 plus a half dozen packets of Cambodian spice mixes thrown in (for me, not the cats.)  Reasonable, or not?  She was asking $25 for the Vietnamese grinder, if you're curious.  Same size, same style, but blades and extruder looked shoddy.

My final accomplishment du jour:  Doing a load of laundry in my washing machine, whose buttons are all labelled in Japanese.  I must have pressed the right ones, because cleanliness ensued.

Things are not perfect here in Phenomenal Penguin; challenges and frustrations abound, and my disorientation is extreme. I keep reminding myself that I was in KL just a few months short of a decade. It had become very familiar and comfortable.  Still, I feel unspeakably blessed and lucky that things here are going as well as they have so far.

The cat-house

A post for all my catty friends...  Most of you asked if the apartment is secure for the cats, and the answer is a resounding yes! In their bid to keep mosquitoes out, the owners have screened every window, and all four doors have screen doors, as well.  The windows also have a metal grille for security.

The front doors, nicely screened, looking out onto the balcony

Maneki has taken to napping in the space between the grille and the window.

Crumpet is still wandering all over the house.  I find her napping here and there, or taking her evening constitutional on the "roof" of the master bathroom.

The balcony will have to be off limits for my cats.  More than once I've looked out from the living room window and spotted a neighbourhood cat perched atop the balcony table.  When I come out to say hello, they invariably bolt.  Clearly they can come in off the street, get under the fence and trot up the spiral staircase to the balcony, which suggests that my cats could make the reverse route.

I'm afraid Maneki and Crumpet would last a matter of minutes in this 'hood.  I heard a cat-fight last night that made all our hair and fur stand on end.  This morning my downstairs neighbour mentioned to me that the PP street cats are the fiercest she's ever seen anywhere in the world.  I think they'd make mincemeat out of my pampered, jet-setting fluffballs.  ("Your cats fly on plane," mused Realtor Jacky.  "I never go on plane.  Not even see all Cambodia province.")

I'm sitting out on the balcony as I type this, and Maneki is yowling at me through the screen door.  Sorry, Fuzzbutt, but I'm not keen on paying your vet bills when you get mauled by a local moggie or run over by a tuktuk.  Life is hard like that.

Welcome to Phenomenal Penguin!

A note about the blog title:  Whenever I type Phnom Penh on my Lenovo phone, it autocorrects to Phenomenal Penguin.  So we'll let it stand.  

A note about the blog content:  I’d stopped keeping a personal blog years ago, but as we sat in a KLIA coffee shop after checking in the two cats for the flight to Cambodia, one of my friends suggested that I resume blogging. Not everyone uses Facebook, after all.  It also struck me that this will be as much a record for me as for anyone who wants to bother reading it.  There is something very fleeting about the new perceptions of a city, before everything comes to be familiar and even mundane.  After a few months, you tend to gloss over the fact that Phenomenal Penguin is not at all like Kuala Lumpur, Bursa, Helsinki, or Portland, Maine. I’ve visited PP ten times in as many years, but living here is a whole new trip.

I bought my Malaysia Airlines ticket (Air Asia won’t carry pets) on the day MH370 vanished, and three weeks later, as I leaned back into seat 17A and sipped my wine, toasting the fact that the cats were actually on the flight with me (a whole lot of planning and fretting involved there), I looked over at my neighbour’s Malay Mail, the headline of which read, “MH370 ENDED in the Indian Ocean”, the capitals and red ink adding utterly superfluous emphasis.   The clouds beneath our plane looked like a meringue gone mad. Yes, I do know that air travel is statistically the safest, but the timing did not feel auspicious.

But MH762 did set down on time in the appointed place.  I sailed through Immigration, inaugurating my shiny new one-year, renewable, multiple-entry visa while most of the other passengers were busy filling out forms and queuing for their on-arrival visas.  My hideous, huge suitcase in shades of Pepto-Bismol and plum, nicely set off by the RM79 price sticker, which I perversely left in place, was rolling past on the conveyor belt just as I walked up.  But where were the cats?

"What the fuzz just happened to us?!"

In the middle of the terminal, surrounded by a curious crowd.  I hoisted their carriers onto a trolley, wheeling the pink monstrosity behind, and off we went to Customs.  I went through the "Items to Declare" line. It just seemed like the thing to do.  The officer, busily chatting with his colleague on the other side of the fence, looked first stunned, then slightly irked.  I seemed to be the only one on the plane trying to declare something, and it was interrupting his conversation.  He looked me up and down, and then seemed to have decided that I was simply confused.  "You have something to declare?" he asked.  "Two cats," I replied. "Two cats," he repeated.  He did not look into the carriers; there might as well have been... I don't know, penguins in there for all he cared.  "You have a paper?" he suggested. I handed over my painstakingly procured exit documents.  He glanced at the top page for a split second, just long enough to spot what looked like some sort of an official stamp, chop or seal, and then waved us away.  And that was that.

I normally take a tuk-tuk from the airport, but I thought the noise and wind might be a bit much for the cats, so we splurged and took a taxi.  The driver told me there would be a $3 surcharge for the furred ones.  Ok, so what would have been his tip became the cat fee. 15 minutes, and we were home.