2nd April (2020)

 

2nd April

I get up. I shower, wash hair, brush teeth, dress. I take my plate, three eggs and a tomato downstairs to make breakfast. The gas canister is empty. The kitchen has been left in a mess and, heaven forefend, the back door (which leads onto an alley) is left unlocked and slightly open. Ho hum. I’ve never been good at communal living, but I am trying my hardest to tread a very thin line between non-interference and friendliness. I miss the freedom of my home. 

Back upstairs, in my small room with its small table, I rustle up sliced bread (four slices), extract my pat of French butter (Elle & Vire), from the small fridge outside and open a small jar of palm sugar. I then begin constructing my breakfast sandwiches. Coffee is not large, flavoursome or flat (as in Flat White), no those days pass into memory as a retrospective golden age, the age of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, of good coffee, proper bagels with jalapeño pepper and cream cheese. Bagels are not bagels in Siem Reap, they lack, well, something. My coffee is Nescafe Red, with palm sugar and milk; my bagel is bread from Jasmine Bakery & Coffee, in these new Days of Covid 19.

I Facebook PM to Julia, just to see if she is okay.

Colors of Cambodia’s American volunteer teacher Julia, who has taught on and off in the charity, had been in Cambodia but took a trip to India to further her yoga studies. She got stranded in India, because of various Covid 19 lockdowns and has, finally and safely, landed in North America. She had been placed on an evacuation flight out of Delhi, which was paid for by the ‘Latter Day Saints’, landed and caught two more flights heading toward Chicago. She is in quarantine, then planning to go all Walden (Walden, Life in the Woods, famous novel by Henry David Thoreau about living in seclusion for two years and two months, which heavily influenced Beat writer Jack Kerouac). Walden, incidentally, is a place called Walden Pond, Near Concord, Massachusetts.

Today’s spend, including a piece of sheer self-indulgence, to wit $1.50 on a Chocolate and Kampot pepper ice cream at Gelato Lab, in Mondol 1 Village; $5.30 for 2 yogurts; slices of Arla ‘Burger’ cheese (Cheddar Taste), Frissee and water. Total is $6.80. I tried the Asia Market, not only was it smaller than Thai Huot Market, but more expensive too. So I walk from Sivatha Rd, Krong, back to Preah Sangreach Tep Vong St, Krong, on a quite quiet, but nevertheless hot and sunny Cambodian day.

Lunch is the two pots of yogurt. As I type (on the midi Mac), I have just had afternoon tea with a few McVities Digestive biscuits. Must keep up the culture into which I was born, don’t you know.

The threatened power cut so far (fingers crossed) hasn’t happened. Oops, perhaps I shouldn’t have written that, tempting fate and all that. 

As there are so many people isolated, quarantined, locked down, the Internet has been a ‘godsend’. Using Facebook to keep in contact with friends really does help. Yes, there is a lot of stupidity but, generally, there is a lot of (okay stupid) fun too. Memes, such as ‘name 10 bands you watched, one being false’, giving people artist’s name for them to look up, seems trivial, sometimes it is the trivial which saves us all from sinking into lockdown depression. I too teeter on the brink of that one.