Our Christmas tree is a little different in Cambodia but Mel has made the day special for everyone as always…

Pancakes for breakfast, Christmas decorations and some little treats in stockings (boots)

Community Christmas Carols in the common area on our street.

It had a very Pacific vibe with Aussies, Kiwis, Fijians, Filipinos and Koreans all singing (and some dancing)

Ben found some live snakes (eels?) at the local markets…

And Melissa found a new way to get to and from the markets, now that Naomi’s bike legs are a bit stronger

It’s been zero days since our last plumbing emergency 🤦‍♂️

Cosy Christmas carols in Cambodia

Enjoying the heat of the fire as we listen to carols on a lazy Saturday afternoon

Another public holiday today so we went to the Country Club to swim in the pool. 25m salt water pool that was only being used by one other person at the time.

Yesterday we went out for a buffet brunch with Matt’s IT co-workers. They were farewelling one member of their team who is moving on to new things.

Yesterday was Ben’s 11th birthday. He had to go to school but we enjoyed his choice dinner and then chocolate brownie cake for dessert.

Today is a public holiday. After homemade pancakes we went to the battery change place to change some US Dollars into Riel.

Later we walked/rode down an old road to a new borey. We stopped at the Book Cafe for some delicious drinks and picture books.

Yesterday Ming also brought me a gift-Cambodian tapioca pudding. A dessert here with banana, tapioca and coconut milk served warm. Naomi and I liked little bits of it, Ben not so much.

Naomi had a ride home from school with Ming yesterday-she wasn’t particularly keen to do it again ☺️

We’ll (hopefully) post more about our new house soon but for now here are two teasers:

• A pleasing photo of our cupboard after Mel got rid of the unicorn vomit coat hangers • Ben enjoying our new couch that arrived on our first afternoon (1 couch still to come)

With work, school and moving house, the past 2 weeks have been busy (hence the lack of blog posts).

Today we decided to travel Khmer style and squeeze into a 3 person tuk tuk (we’ve seen 6 in one). It was all smiles at the start but we probably won’t try that again 😝

Stairway to heaven 🤔

5 storey escalator while visiting Olympia Mall in the city and playing tourists

We’re still getting used to the currencies (plural). Cambodia uses both US Dollars and Cambodian Riel.

The rule of thumb is 4,000 riel equals $1 although the actual exchange rate is closer to 4,100.

The government has made some recent moves to discourage the smaller US notes ($1, $2 and $5) so it’s hit or miss whether they’ll be accepted (and therefore whether we should accept them as change). So far they seem to be mostly acceptable.

The smallest note we’ve seen is 100 riel (approximately 2¢). Apparently 50 riel notes also exist.

The most common notes we see are 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000. We have seen 2,000 and 20,000 notes too (the latter being the rough equivalent of $5). We are yet to see a 50,000 riel note.

The conversion is not difficult, but it is tiring and sometimes confusing figuring out prices, conversions and change. Today I paid $25 for $23.28 worth of groceries and received 7,000 riel change (the correct amount, but I would have needed a calculator if I’d wanted to check it at the time).

Below is a very thick stack of bills totalling 67,100 riel (according to Banker Ben). That’s a little under US$17 or AU$23. It can be a nuisance to carry it all around and make sure you have a variety of notes for small purchases.

The bigger challenge though is perspective. That thick stack of bills is a nuisance to us… but for a textiles worker (for example) that’s almost 1 week’s wages for a physically demanding job.

Another example is tuk tuk drivers. A 32 minute journey to a bank in the city cost us 6,300 riel ($1.60) the other day. It’s a low paying job and sometimes I have to catch myself getting frustrated when a tuk tuk driver doesn’t have 2,000 riel change on hand for a 10,000 note.

We’re having an arty morning while listening to music on our first of three days off school.

Ben and Mel are plastering a mask for school art, Naomi is drawnting (drawing/painting) with her brush pens and I’m, you guessed it, taking photos 🙂

Yesterday we had a LOT of rain, enough to turn our street into a canal

For perspective, here’s a well-and-truly-submerged speed hump:

Here’s some “front/back” photos that show 180° opposite views…

1. In the tuk tuk, girls facing forwards, boys facing backwards
2. Sunday Lunch (hot chips sandwiches) at the shopping centre
3. Enjoying the afternoon rain in our front courtyard

Father’s Day today! Didn’t seem to rate a mention in Cambodia but we celebrated anyway. We had pancakes for breakfast, Matt hunted for his presents (chocolate, coke and pop tarts) and we had dinner out at a pizza and burger joint.

While Mel was preventing floods and Ben was wading outside, I was on my way to soccer.

When I arrived, I was mildly amused to see a policeman standing in shin-deep water directing traffic… until I realised I got out of the tuk tuk on the wrong side of that very same intersection 😆

At first I tried to pick my way through the shallowest sections (while dodging motos, tuk tuks, cars and trucks) but I quickly gave up and just embraced the soggy socks and sneakers lifestyle.

Once I made it across and into the facility, I was very impressed to discover a massive shed with about 6 high quality, astro-turf fields.

We ended up with three teams rotating through games of six-a-side, under cover and under lights, and it was a blast, even in soggy shoes.

I reluctantly (but exhaustedly) headed home after 90 minutes to have dinner with my long-suffering family. When I left many of the players were still going strong!

Probably the best $2 I’ve spent since we arrived 🙂

It rained hard and fast this afternoon. We nearly had a flood in one of the bedrooms! But our street certainly did flood-here is Ben walking the street in ankle deep water just outside our house.

Today we pumped up the tires on the bikes and I took the kids on a test ride around our borey (housing estate).

Naomi said “I think this is my new favourite thing” 🤯

Ben is disappointed we’re making him wait until after dinner to go again.

😀👍

Today we shopped at Makro, a large super store that reminds us a bit of Costco.

I took Ben through the meat section, something he never wants to do again 😜 It’s self serve (like the fruit and veg section). We didn’t buy black chicken or pork hearts/uteri (uteruses?)

Tonight we went out for a meal to celebrate making it through one week of school/work/life here in Phnom Penh.

We had a delicious meal at Jars of Clay Cafe, a social enterprise that employs vulnerable and disadvantaged women.

Heading out on a date together…

…to wait in a line at the bank 😂

Melissa, Naomi and Ben visited school today for new family orientation. It was Melissa and Ben’s first time seeing the school.

I left with them to get some equipment for work. As we were leaving school 4 (wild?) horses crossed the road in front of our rickshaw 🤯

We celebrated the end of our quarantine with a family swim!

We even bumped into a HOPE family with 2 kids in the same grades as ours 🤯

It was lovely to get out of the house and splash around together… and then to get back to the house and turn the air conditioning on 😀

One benefit of COVID-19 (for us while we’re in quarantine) is online church and growth groups.

We’ve been able to continue meeting with our Sydney groups over Zoom. Plus they’re at 4:30pm our time, so we’re also less tired when we attend too! 🙂

We are waiting for our 13 day COVID test to (God willing) end our quarantine.

We took a tuk tuk and a rickshaw to get here.

Played a few rounds of 31 while we waited.

The kids spent some time this morning building Lego spinning tops. The tile floors are great for spinning!

After a great night’s sleep (all in one bedroom with a working aircon) we spent our 2nd day of quarantine starting to figure out life here…

We successfully:

• evicted a feline squatter
• bought water
• made lunch
• washed clothes
• cut Ben’s hair

Chalking today up as a win!

Waiting for our bus home from the quarantine hotel… the croissants and banana bread from a cafe around the corner were amazing! 🤩

During transition training they advised us to farewell significant places, as well as people.

Today we said goodbye to the Armoury, a fantastic park with awesome play equipment (and today, a surprise water feature under the flying foxes)

Our flights are booked, again! This is our 3rd lot of flights but these ones have actually been flying each week, despite the pandemic.

Our new departure date is Sat 8th August!

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The rollercoaster continues! Two weeks ago we announced we’d received an exemption to the travel ban and had booked our flights to Cambodia 🥳

A few days later our flights were cancelled, again!!! 😭

Right now we’re back in limbo, waiting to find and book CONFIRMED flights! 🙃

Less than a month ago I wrote “Dates are confirmed, flights are booked and deadlines are looming!”

Today, dates are back up in the air, flights might be cancelled and deadlines are uncertain.

Although we did have our first day of school from home!

We’ve been fixing things here and there to get our house ready for tenants moving in and after each task we’ve been asking ourselves “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”.

First it was ripping up the old carpet in the dining room… Mel has always disliked it so when we found reasonable (albeit water stained) floorboards underneath we immediately regretted not doing it years ago! With the benefit of hindsight, we would have very happily thrown a rug over the raw floor boards and used the room that way rather than keep the ugly, stained carpet around for so long.

Then yesterday, we borrowed a high pressure hose and cleaned 5 (to 10) years of gunk off the planks on the back deck. It immediately looked so much better!

We then knocked all the nails back below the surface, ready for a coat of oil to go on top.

So why didn’t we do these things sooner!?

Generously, perhaps it was because we were trying to be content with what we have, not constantly chasing after upgrades, renovations or improvements.

Cynically, perhaps we were just lazy and apathetic, too focused on the present to notice the stains and gunk of the past around us, or to look ahead to future possibilities.

Realistically, there was probably a little bit of both of those things but I think the main reason is a lot simpler… Our upcoming move to Cambodia has got us thinking about ways to prepare and has shifted us from being homeowners to being future landlords.

Replacing the missing section of railing on our deck wasn’t a high priority for us a month ago, but making the house safe for tenants is, so that’s what I’m working on today.

I don’t know what the lesson in all of this is, or if there even is one. It’s a bit of a bummer that our house is going to be in the best condition it’s ever been in, right before we move out and someone else gets to enjoy it… But we’re actually really okay with that.

Besides, we know from John 14 that there’s a MUCH better place prepared for us; one without leaky gutters, water damaged floor boards and asbestos lining. Lord hasten the day!

P.S. We know that moving countries and adjusting to a new culture will be difficult at times but we’re hoping that once we settle in we’ll be asking ourselves the same question, why didn’t we do this sooner? 🙂

People are going crazy stocking up on rice, pasta and toilet paper. Meanwhile we’re at the point where we’re choosing not to buy some things in bulk (e.g. sauce to refill squeeze bottles) so that we don’t have too much waste when we move.

We’re not sure how the spread of COVID-19 will affect our planned move in July. At this stage there’s been only one confirmed case in Cambodia but a lot can, and will, change between now and then so we’re just going to have to wait, trust and see.

Dates are confirmed, flights are booked and deadlines are looming!

There’s lots to be done to get ready but we’ve still got 19 weeks before we pack up and go.

We’re looking forward to a few days and nights together as a family in Singapore before we arrive in Cambodia.