Living and Teaching in Small Town Cambodia

There isn’t much metropolitan sophistication to be found here and Battambang is not a place to live for anybody with a low boredom threshold. When we go to the bar we are talking literally and mean the bar, for there is only one with a western owner and the home comforts one can expect from an expat owned bar. Aside from the late night karaoke venues, which are very much set up for the local market, the town including its one western owned bar, goes to bed well before midnight. Hence, on the one hand, bar bills seldom amount to much and one gets to view life from a relatively sober vantage point but on the other hand Battambang would provide the perfect agony of boredom for most metropolitan night owls.

The four-sided well defined space of shady French designed streets is still a delight but is nonetheless under attack, although not yet on the destructive scale that we can see happening in Phnom Penh – which has already led to that city losing much of its charm. Nevertheless, unregulated development here is still happening albeit at a slower pace. One long time expat has estimated that in ten years here he’s seen over 50% of the historical buildings in the French town either demolished outright or renovated unsympathetically with their original facades often being replaced at best with charmless garish tiling and new, ‘modern’ and quite unvaryingly ugly windows or at worst with a vast plastic advertising board covering the entire upper story of the shophouse.

Yet having considered these gripes, on a hot April night in Battambang with dusk slowly creeping in from the distance and with an ice-cold beer in my hand and just enough of a breeze to lightly shake the leaves of the palm trees outside my house, Phnom Penh (and its teeming traffic and air thick with fumes and with its thousands of motorbikes all trying to simultaneously blow their horns in unison) seems a long, long way away.

There’s a lot to be said for solitude and serenity.

peter@khmer440.com

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