market day
by Rachael
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Every day is market day, actually.
But today we went to the Russian market as well as our local one. Apparently the Russians in town used to shop there, hence the name, but we didn’t see any today.
We did see a couple of girls, who cooked us lunch – at eighteen years old and the height of our ten year old, they giggled uncontrollably at discovering Jgirl14’s age.
We also saw a man who sold us metres and metres of grey silk last week.
And the lady who has sewn it up into sleeping bag liners for us.
We chided ourselves for not taking the camera to get a shot of the little (and I mean little – it was seriously no more than four square metres) stall stacked high with bolts of cloth. And it would have been nice to have a picture of our sewing lady at her machine wedged in between two flimsy “walls”, surrounded by other ladies and their machines (you can buy any item of clothing and have it altered on the spot) and the clothing stalls bursting with tshirts and pyjamas (for day wear) and sarongs and frilly dresses and jeans.
But we forgot the camera and so here are some pictures of the totally different Central Market we visited the other day. (Maybe not *totally* different – there were clothes and watches and washing powder and bottled water and metal plates and bamboo baskets and live chickens and dead pigs, to market, to market to buy a fat pig! – but this market is a bit more spacious, a bit less populated and a bit more expensive.)
All around the outside of the big dome are little stalls….but even as people were clearing out their wares, the buildings were being dismantled. It seemed to be an unexpected development in the day’s proceedings for some of the stall-holders, who really did look caught unawares. Take a look:
Tags: postcard: Cambodia
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