Home Tour (Part 2)

My family just remodeled the kitchen, although for some reason they still cook outside. Our backyard is where I do my laundry and my family cooks, does laundry, and prepares the vegetables to sell at the market. They spend most of their time here. I do not enjoy it because there is a large amount of flies. My father builds things in the back forest looking area. I am not sure what goes on there as I do not venture out into the yard. Somewhere there is a hen house (unsure if it is ours or not as all of these buildings' yards are combined, numerous cats and roosters. The latter are my sworn enemy. If you have ever tried to sleep past 5am in Cambodia you would know exactly what I am talking about. Perhaps the roosters are just trying to alert me to the beautiful sunset over the Mekong that I am missing.



The area that connects the kitchen and the living room is my parents bathroom and a storage area where they keep the dishes and hang laundry.



The living room is fairly big. It is where we eat dinner, my family prays and studies prayer, and where I study Khmer with my tutor. We have a small TV that my family does not really watch, they prefer to listen to the radio. We also keep my bike and my dads moto here at night.





In the last picture, you can see two common items in Cambodian homes: alters to honor spirits and ancestors. The alter on the floor is to keep bad spirits out and protect the inside of the home. There is usually one outside the home to keep bad spirits off of the land. We have no front yard so my host mom just puts incense on the door. The one that is mounted to a wall or put somewhere high up is to honor the family ancestors. There is usually a picture of them put around it. My mother offers fruit, incense, money (fake?) and other treats to the spirits. The official religion of Cambodia is Theravada Buddhism. The ultimate goal is to rid yourself of desire and suffering so that you may be reincarnated at the highest level. To read more about religion in Cambodia, go to: