We Live Underground

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I couldn’t really tell you too much about this because I could only see it from the window of the tourist bus, but the way that Cambodians in Phnom Penh live is pretty crazy.  It’s a kind of poor/undeveloped city and it’s extremely, extremely hot.  So try to imagine sort of a desert with some roads built on top of it and a river running through it at one point.  Then put a whole lot of shops on the roads.

 

So the people mostly live right under the shops.  There’ll be a line of about five or six stores, and then there’s this tiny little alleyway about five feet wide and the opening will take you downward maybe eight feet.  It goes for a while back – maybe fifty yards – and there are houses attached to the little pathway.  Most of the pathways that I saw were dirt, I think, but some of them may have been concrete.

 

I thought that was pretty cool.  I mean, life is really hot and pretty poor and tough, but that’s a great way to use the space you have and to keep cool, being that low, close to earth, and completely shielded by at least two floors of buildings at all times.  There was also just sort of something interesting about the fact that most Cambodians that I saw lived underground essentially.