There’s a new Milk Tea shop near our house and I couldn’t help but notice that Winnie the Pooh is out promoting it. This might seem like the kind of innocuous copyright infringement that often occurs here but in Asia the combination of Winnie the Pooh and Milk Tea are actually a meaningful political statement….
Author: Charles
No visit to the US this year.
We had originally planned to travel back to the US in March of this year for our first home leave. There were many reasons we couldn’t do this in March but they all have the same root cause; as Charlotte has come to say with weary disgust, “because of COVID.” That remains true now as…
Book Review: Cry of the Gecko
Our SALT participant, Andy, who left for home last month left me a copy of Brian Maher’s 2012 book Cry of the Gecko. It’s an accounting of Christian Mission in Cambodia and documents a lot of precious history that would easily be lost otherwise. MCC is mentioned more than a few times (including a recounting…
Voltra Matrix Test Drive
Last week Doungchann, our administrative assistant, and I went to test drive the Voltra Matrix. This is the first ‘made in Cambodia’ electric moto. If you’ve been to Phnom Penh, you know that the air and noise pollution are major problems. Cambodia is also consistently ranked as one of the top ten countries in the…
Activate Windows
Microsoft recently announced that they’re ending support for Windows 10 in 2025. Way back when Microsoft introduced Windows 10, they said it would be a shift from Windows as a product to Windows as a service and that it would be the last, final, and forever version of Windows. But they changed their minds. This…
Heart of Crown & the COVID game
I think it’s probably clear by now that we love playing games as a family. During our staycation, we got into a card game called Heart of Crown that I had brought with us when we moved here in 2019. It is very similar to Dominion, for those who have played that, but with the…
Brazilian Cuisine (the Restaurant)
Brazilian Cuisine is a restaurant in Phnom Penh run by Tida En and his family. By day, Tida is an IT professional who runs his own IT business, runs IT for an anti-trafficking NGO, and runs IT for an international Christian school. But, since that’s not enough running, several evenings a week Tida also runs…
សាឡាក់ | Snake Fruit
Snake Fruit, or Salak, is a species of palm tree native to the islands of Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It’s a seasonal fruit that can be found at local markets here in Cambodia but isn’t as common as other seasonal fruits like Mangosteen, Rambutan, or Longan. The outer skin of the fruit is where…
No more Cambodian stamps, for now.
When I was a child I remember the excitement of receiving postcards and letters from my Uncle Daniel who lived in Europe with foreign and exotic stamps. These simple little reminders that the world was vast broadened my world view and, besides that, they were really interesting. I never got into stamp collecting like my…
Charlotte Fruit Shopping
Charlotte’s newest household responsibility is to do the fruit shopping while I get the vegetables and meat at our local grocery shop. She loves guava.