French Architecture

I know every person who comes to a foreign country suddenly starts to think they work for National Geographic, and can take terribly personal pictures of total strangers for no reason. However. I'm going to add a few because it FEELS like I live in a National Geographic magazine sometimes. People walk past me with sarongs and baskets on their heads. A man with buckets hanging from a bamboo pole across his shoulders. Naked children eating sugarcane. A woman with a shop ironing clothes with a 19th century andiron -- scooping coals with a bucket into the mechanism to heat it. Women working late into the night in open shops full of sewing machines. Drinking 7-up out of a plastic bag full of ice chipped off with a rusted hammer. A woman on the sidewalk of a restaurant chopping up a whole chicken with a cleaver on a round piece of wood.

Here's my contribution:


The French Colonial Architecture is everywhere in Battambang. If you want your fill of picturesque distressed plaster walls, come here.


A woman riding past the YWAM base with her child. Since diapers are expensive, and washing cloth diapers impracticle for a society that washes all clothes in a metal bowl, most small children don't wear clothes on the bottom half of their body. And lots wear nothing at all. It takes some getting used to, especially when a naked little boy comes up to play with you...