Painting the house, going green

Studying the Khmer script has a few benefits.

1. It's good mental exercise. Struggling to draw, recognise and remember all those squiggles is working areas of my brain that have sat idly in my head for years.
2. It will improve my spoken Khmer, because learning to write the 60+ vowel sounds helps me to distinguish them. In many cases, they sound nearly identical to my ear, and only when I see them written do I grasp that they're different phonemes.  The Khmer words for doing laundry and breast-feeding are distressingly close in sound. I imagine beginning Chinese speakers have the same experience: they can't distinguish the tones but can see that two words which sound alike (to them) are represented by different characters.
3. The tiled walls on my balcony have a whole new artsy look.

By the time we get through all
33 consonants, I'll have the whole house painted.

I spend an hour or two every day on the balcony with erasable markers. Can I remember the words for sting-ray and negotiate? And then can I write them?  

Around the corner from my scribbles, another of my efforts is tucked under the stairway to the roof:  My makeshift compost bin.  A few people have told me that the concept of biodegradability is simply unknown to most Cambodians. For centuries they wrapped their foods in banana leaves and other natural fibres. When they were finished, they simply tossed the wrappers onto the ground, and nature did the clean-up. Now they simply toss plastic and styrofoam with the same abandon, having no clue that it won't just disappear in the same way. You'd think they would have observed this phenomenon by now -- that plastic bags are hanging around, and around, and around -- but it doesn't seem to have clicked. Consequently, my landlady sweeps up all the fallen leaves and other garden waste and puts it out for the rubbish collectors in plastic bags.  Nearly all of my waste is biodegradable, and it was just killing me to take it out in plastic. It would make sense to build a small compost bin in the back of the garden and encourage Yee to use it, as well, but I suspect she would recoil in horror at the thought of "garbage" building up, rotting and stinking, in her garden, and my Khmer is not yet up to the task of explaining that a healthy compost heap neither rots nor stinks. 

So I'll do my own composting on my balcony and will offer her some of the 'black gold' results, assuming I can manage to produce them. I bought a couple of plastic laundry baskets, thinking I can just pour the composting material from one to the other when it needs turning.

We're going green up here.

I'm using paper waste (what little I have) and leaf litter for brown matter to balance the acidity of all my kitchen waste. With no worms, composting is going to be a slow process (if it works at all), but at least there's no odour, so it's not rotting. Fingers crossed.

Speaking of green stuff, my friends Ellen and Tom lugged 2 kgs of wheat grass seed to Phnom Penh from Kuala Lumpur when they came to visit last month. The cats are thrilled. They'll be nibbling on wheat grass for years to come, and I'll be dutifully cleaning up all the puddles of green vomit.

There is a large nursery just around the corner from the house, and they're a great source of pots and soil, but unfortunately they sell only decorative plants. Seeds for my balcony's container garden will have to come from elsewhere. I'd really like a big pot of mint and another of parsley. 

Finally, speaking of natural materials, I sent the photos of my new bike to my friend Markku in Helsinki. After acknowledging the excellent qualities of the bamboo frame -- light weight, durability, excellent shock absorption -- he felt obliged to note the perils.  

 "... just beware of giant pandas."