I arrived in Cambodia on Monday. We touched down around 10:15am, after two blissful hours checking e-mail and skyping in the Kuala Lumpur (KL) airport.
Getting off the plane, I am immediately hit by the heat and humidity. The entire airport in KL was fiercely air-conditioned, and the temperature must have been lower in the early morning. After a week of 0 degree (C.) weather in England and Sweden, the weather itched like a blanket of mosquitoes.
After a futile attempt to get a business visa, I sailed out of the airport into a cab. What followed was the worse traffic i've ever experienced in Cambodia. Traffic in Phnom Penh is often compared to the flow of fish in the ocean or a body of water. In this case, the stream looked and felt migratory, bursting with salmon, minnows, the occaisonal lobster, and a few eels (Black SUVs with Army plates, usually driven by the wealthy or politically connected).
I arrived at my apartment and hour or so after landing. I'm staying in an apartment at "Golden Tour Eiffel, in what I call the Langka neighborhood (it has Khmer title as well which is long and not used frequently). It's a large one-bedroom on the third floor, and is almost the size of my three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, with a kitchen/dining room, large and roomy master bedroom, and balcony. It goes for $15 a night, plus $40 monthly for internet, and the staff/family that lives downstairs does daily laundry for free, cleans, and are very friendly when I enter and leave.
Since i've arrived, I've spent most of my time working, eating, catching up on e-mail, and sleeping.
Loisaida is a term derived from the Latino (and especially Puerto Rican) pronunciation of "Lower East Side", a neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City. Loisaida Avenue is now an alternate name for Avenue C in the Alphabet City neighborhood of New York City, whose population has largely been Hispanic (mainly Puerto Rican) since the late 1960s.
1 comment:
is the $0 for internet per night, like the room charge, or hopefully per month?
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