Large Boeung Kak Lake in Phnom Penh is being filled as part city development: Cambodia

Also related:
The Battle for Boeung Kak Lake by Far Eastern Economic Review’s Ron Gluckman

This set of photographs of Siem Reap’s floating village tells a story of how travelers see the life on the lake.

The floating forest has inhabitants like birds and monkeys, and during the rainy season when the water level rises, monkeys will tend to swim across the water body and get to safer land. The unfortunate thing is if the monkey carries a baby with it, it is likely the baby would drown.

On a trip to Phnom Penh from Bangkok, a traveler at ‘flashbacks, time after time’ puts some thoughts on the visit to The Place, the Russian Market, a North Korean restaurant, the Grand Palace, the Silver Pagoda, and the Killing Fields.

Also, there’s an interesting thing about a new North Korean restaurant in the Cambodian capital opened soon after Pyongyang, an oldest and only North Korean Restaurant, was closed recently.

Love Cambodia. We had lunch at a restaurant, a Korean restaurant, to be more specific a North Korean restaurant. Yep. There were actually a lot of those in Phnom Penh. Word on the street is, the waitresses in their hamboks, moved down to Cambodia to serve North Korean food… and they aren’t allowed to leave the restaurant. They live upstairs and can’t go outside. What a life. I asked one of the waitresses a couple questions in Korean. She basically felt sorry for me, because my family was from South Korea and that she missed Pyongyang a lot.

Chelsea at Wanderlust and Wanderlost reflected on her visit to Cambodia. In this post, it’s all about why Cambodia is the most frustrating country the traveler has visited.

1. Corruption: Cambodia is one of the worlds most corrupt countries. In a study done by Transparency International, Cambodia was given a rating of 2, 10 meaning not corrupt, zero meaning totally corrupt. There were only 13 countries that received worse scores…

2. Scams/Getting Ripped off: People are always trying to make money any way that they can, and a lot of them resort to scamming tourists to get it. In places like Siem Reap and Sihanoukville, Westerners are viewed more as walking ATMs…

3. Children: Children are recruited early to start selling (although begging is a more accurate term) to the tourists. In Angkor, children as young as four years old approach you, trying to impress you with their English and knowledge about other countries…

4. Backpackers/Tourists: I won’t lump all backpackers into a negative group, because I am one, but there are plenty of tourists that come to Cambodia without understanding the situation of the country…

5. Humidity: This isn’t Cambodia’s fault, but I really hate humidity! So does my hair…

Update: November 14th, 2009
5 beautiful things about Cambodia

Some more pictures of renovated Central Market (Phsar Thmey) can be found here. Early, Cambopedia also linked to a blog post of French-styled architecture built in the Cambodian capital.

‘hoebian’ at ‘There And Back Again’ blog has a post of beautiful pictures of Cambodian silk, taken at Angkor Silk Farm. The photos will walk you through to understand how Khmer silk cloth is made.

Don’t know what to do in Phnom Penh? Ask Lady Penh!
If you’re interested in what you might want to do in Phnom Penh, a dedicated site Lady Penh is the right one for you. It’s for both expatriates and visitors who want to make the most out of the day attending cultural related events in Phnom Penh. The name of the site, Lady Penh, implies the name of the legendary founder, Daun (Grandma) Penh, of the capital city.

You can find new updates of some of the most interesting events happening in town. Rather than just a one-stop of activity calendar for visitors and tourists, the site provides detail information about each event that you wouldn’t want to miss.

Lady Penh – this website – is all about events in Phnom Penh. We are a bunch of fellow PhnomPenhers with the feeling that our city is somewhat at crossroads: it’s getting kind of tough to keep track of what’s going on here – which had not been too hard until 2009 (to say the least). Phnom Penh is awakening… And this website is our participation to this process.

A nice feature of the site is its printable weekly version, which can be found here. In addition to this, if you’re a Facebooker, you can easily get connected with Lady Penh via Facebook Group page.

Web address: http://ladypenh.com/