It finally happened last night: I slept in my new apartment for the first time. And I am as happy as a clam.
After two other places fell through for various reasons and after the previous tenant in this apartment suddenly pushed back his departure date to “sometime later in the week,” I almost began to think it would never actually happen. But there I was yesterday evening, piling my embarrassingly high number of bags into a tuk-tuk and heading North to the corner of Streets 178 and 19. This area is a little less “polished” than the one where I moved from, but I think I’m going to like it infinitely more. It’s got much more character, and I finally feel like I’m out of the NGO expat land that was the previous neighborhood and much more in the thick of Cambodia. I’ve even already discovered that a food cart of breakfast noodles sets up on the corner everyday and am looking forward to that easy snack in the morning before starting my daily lesson planning.
In many ways, some of the excitement of moving is also that this is my first apartment of my own (well, of my own and Brendan’s own to be exact), and all of the excitement of actually having a place has been true even here on the other side of the globe. I all of a sudden realized today that it still counts as my first apartment, even if it’s not in the US and even if I know I’ll be moving out in a year. In reality, I guess it’s a pretty big step in my life.
The previous renter is an expat from the States working with the tribunal in some way and heading out of the country for some time to work in Thailand. He wanted someone to essentially take over the rent until he gets back next summer, and we were interested in moving into a place possibly temporarily until another one we liked opened up in December. We met up with the previous resident, Michael, through a person whom Brendan works with who knew we were looking for a place. When we actually went to check the place out, we decided that, while it wasn’t perfect, it seemed like a good find and that we’d try it for the rest of the year rather than our initial temporary plan. If we ended up regretting our choice, we figured that the rent is so cheap that it wouldn’t be hard to find people willing to sublease it from us.
So in fulfilling what everyone says, we ended up finally moving into the one place that was not shown to us by our real estate agent. Every single person we talked to about our apartment search always told us that there are wonderful places in Phnom Penh that you can get for a steal. Wait for the right one they’d say, and take advantage of the community of expats and locals who are constantly looking to help each other out. Well, that was all well and good, but they weren’t exactly introducing us to these magical people who somehow were looking for us to to be the tenants of their ideal, balconied, French colonial, 200 year old villas. Additionally, after looking at literally about 50 places, we were loosing patience and having trouble finding time to constantly look while still working and trying to take advantage of our time here to do other things.
And it seemed like this mythical housing search was perhaps from the Phnom Penh of two years ago, a period of time that makes a significant difference in a place developing as fast as Phnom Penh and in a place where security and political stability were not always givens until recently. Even the Peace Corps didn’t send fellows until this year, the same year in which we are filling PiA’s first posts in the country. But anyway, to us, it seemed like all of those romantically crumbling colonial structures dating a hundred years back had already been snatched up by expats brave enough to have arrived a while ago, when the city was the wild west. It is as if these perfect places were available for the taking recently enough that people still hold out hope and can tell stories from the not too distant past but as if we got here just late enough that signs of renovations are visible on the occasional charmer.
We weren’t really expecting to find an one of the arcaded, ochre colored mansion with mosaic floor tiles and old brass doorknobs, but we were looking for something with a little charm and, for me, a place with a balcony for taking in the warm weather and the sun. Well, assuming I don’t feel differently in a few days, I think we’ve found that place.
Everything about it, from the neighborhood to the apartment itself, just feels right and much more charming and interesting than where we had been living. We’re in a part of town just North of where we were looking for places, which itself was Northeast of where we had been living, but I think I’m developing a fond attachment to this nieghborhood already. Without knowing Phnom Penh’s layout and characteristics, it’s hard to describe to someone else exactly what the area’s like or how it fits into the garnd scheme of the city, but we’re basically in the exact geographic center of town without being right in the middle of things. We’re on the Southern most block of the downtown part of this main section of Phnom Penh, meaning that there’s street life around us and lots of local shops where one can do everything from get a haircut to pick up a palette of bricks to eat some street noodles to get ones moto repaired. Yet we’re just North of the National Museum, the Royal Palace, and some of the main boulevards and park areas of the city. All of the buildings in this downtown part of Phnom Penh are about three to six stories high, and all of the shops are run out of the open bays on the street level floor. There’s therefore a general sense of activity and busyness all around.
At the same time, because we are on the southern edge of this area, there are no tall buildings in front of us, and we look out over the side of the National Museum (actually where it becomes the Royal University of Fine Arts towards the back), with its lush trees and crumbling colonial academic buildings and museum facilities. There are trees and flowers in front, and the location somehow manages to combine the best of both worlds: urban living with open space and views. Even beyond the museum and a little to the left, I can see the golden spires and rooftops of the Royal Palace. And other than that, it’s pretty much palm trees, bushes, and foliage straight ahead. Out front and to the right, we look down Street 19, a North-South street that runs along the backside of the Palace and has a number of diverse looking two-story “row houses.” Way off in the distance, we can even see the top of Independence Monument, a structure modeled after the towers of Angkor Wat, as there aren’t many buildings taller than ours in the nearby Southern direction. At night, we can see the monument’s new illumination from our rooftop terrace. Street 178 itself, our block, is probably one of the most well known and frequented blocks for visitors, as it’s the street that runs perpendicular to the river and Sisowath Quay and is the street that runs next to the side of the FCC on the waterfront. Visitors often know this street well and walk along its sidewalks to its shops and to the entrance of the National Museum. Yet, the front of the museum seems to create the dividing line between the sometimes touristy waterfront and the rest of the downtown. Since we’re on the backside of the museum, we get to take advantage of the access to that riverfront area, but we’re very much surrounded by Cambodian neighbors and off the typical path of most visitors.
Unlike in our previous neighborhood, I actually feel like I’m now really in Cambodia. It doesn’t seem as sanitized and is therefore more stimulating. Before, I sometimes felt like I was living in a not-quite-as-good part of some other tropical city, but now I feel like I’m actually living in Phnom Penh. People are always hanging out in the streets. The architecture is more diverse and appealing. The stuff being sold are things that you’d actually need to live here, and the location makes it much more convenient to get necessities. Overall, the area has texture, which the other area lacked. And now, I see a tiny, tiny fraction of the number of expats I used to see and see infinitely more Cambodians.
There are certainly intimidating aspects of being here. Unlike on Street 278, there isn’t a guard at every house, restaurant, or guesthouse when you come home late at night. Over there, there were usually even people lingering in the lit porches of the restaurants on the corner at around 12:00, getting final drinks or grabbing a late-night bite to eat. The street never really felt desolate. By contrast, most of the shops on the first floor underneath us close at around six, and most of the families, kids, and vendors talking together, playing badminton, and selling food are inside by around 9:30 or 10:00. There’s a wat (temple) literally around the corner on Street 19. As with all of the other wats, the complex takes up about one square block with its monk quarters, main temple, and intricately painted stuppas, and it provides yet more interesting texture to the neighborhood. At the same time, I have learned recently that it tends to be a gangster wat and that this area was once one that you used to stay away from not too long ago.
But as with the rest of the city, things are changing. Across 19 on 178, there’s a juice bar that I stopped in two days ago. The owners, a Cambodian and a Cambodian-American were extremely friendly and joined me while I had a juice and waited to pick up the keys to the apartment. They told me that they had opened two months ago, along with two or three other more upscale-ish bars and restaurants a few doors down. In a place like Phnom Penh, a street having bars and restaurants with staff and patrons at nights gives a block a whole different, more comforting feel. Additionally, in walking down St. 19 a few weeks back near one of our other potential rentals, Brendan and I commented about how much more lit St. 19 felt to us than when we had previously checked out the street at night for a different apartment. It turns out that we weren’t imagining things and that St. 19 was lit a couple of weeks ago, meaning that it’s now one of the “lit streets” and meaning that it’s now safer at night and has steadily become more trafficked. Finally, on the fourth and final corner of Streets 19 and 178 is a gorgeous old French colonial. Its first floor, which used to be divided among numerous Cambodian families into little apartments, was just finally fully purchased by someone who’s started renovating it since we first looked at this apartment.
All in all, it seems like this is an area on the rise, and it’ll be interesting to be in the middle of the changes taking place and to be able to have easy access to seeing an area of the city be transformed. Already, I’ve come to believe that it’s one of the most interesting neighborhoods in the city and a good mix of everything one would be looking for: colonial and Cambodian architecture; some local character with a nicer bar and restaurant here and there; and the busyness of an urban area combined with the openness of the less dense areas of town.
On one corner is the back of the National Museum and the Royal University of Fine Art, comprised of a series of sprawling deep red French colonial buildings with red tiled roofs and surrounded by a chest-height red stucco wall with decorative metal railings. On the other corner is the yellow, hundred-plus year old mansion just starting to be renovated. On the third corner are the stuppas and brightly colored structures and banners of the wat. And on the fourth corner, ours, is a stretch of classic Phnom Penh apartment buildings. As is common and typical of the streetscape here, our apartment is a geometric concrete building rising about four stories tall. They’re tall skinny buildings, one apartment wide, built directly next to each other with entrance usually in the back or through an internal staircase running along a front or sidewall. The balconies are laid out in bands across the front, divided by thin concrete strips that separate neighbors from each other. Like most, the row of buildings that we’re a part of elegantly curves around the corner rather than coming to a right angle. It gives these otherwise fairly simply buildings a certain, geometric elegance. And I somewhat like their simple look. At the same time, I would say, we get the best view, being able to look out at our surroundings rather than the other way around. When describing it to my Mom, she drew an appropriate comparison, saying that we’re like the New Jersey towers looking across the Hudson to the Manhattan skyline rather than the riverfront apartment of New York looking out across a mostly uninteresting opposite shoreline. The only difference is that we still don’t have to say we’re from New Jersey.
To enter our apartment, you walk into a tunnel passageway that runs underneath a neighboring building on the first floor. It appears from the outside just like the surrounding street-level bays/stores, where, on this part of 178, there are a number of Cambodian paint studios that supply the local restaurants and hotels with their requisite paintings of Angkor Wat done up in paint by number-like colors. The difference when you look down our tunnel, however, is that there is light at the end, as it opens up into a little courtyard where the backs of all of the buildings facing the street butt up to each other. The first time I walked down there, I have to admit that I felt like I was majorly invading people’s privacy. The cement courtyard can’t be more than 15 ft. by 30 ft., and during the morning, day, and evening, people who live in these buildings park their motos, play badminton, talk to each other, cook, and for no better word: hang out in the privacy and not so privacy of this inner area.
To get to our place, we make a left as we exit the tunnel into the courtyard area to walk down the narrow space created by the emptiness formed between two nearby buildings. You can see the sky, but it’s very narrow. Only about one and a half people at a time can stand there or walk past, meaning two can pass each other but not without rotating sideways and directly acknowledging the other person. All of the first floor shops/houses have rear doors that open up into this space, and this is where these families do their cooking. At first, I was intimidated to walk through these spaces when I was just looking at the apartment. Evenly spaced women squat over simmering pans of fish or chicken or put axes to logs for soon to be started fires. Now that I actually live here, though, I feel very alive passing through this whole area, and it’s an exciting and chaotic environment to walk through everyday. At night, the embers from the cooking fires glow beneath the used pots and give an atmospheric effect to this small space.
To get up to the apartment, we duck into the second staircase in this alleyway and go up one flight, careful not to hit our head in the narrow, unlit concrete staircase. Most of these older downtown apartments are set up so that the stairwell goes straight up through the buildings about two-thirds of the way back from the front facade. In front are usually the bedrooms and living room, with a set of windows and a door at the very front that leads out to a small rectangular balcony. Almost no buildings here lack balconies for each apartment. Part of the charm of the city is that these small outdoor spaces prevent the streetscape from appearing cold and flat and give life to the street, as people populate more than just one plane and as laundry, plants, and bamboo chairs indicate that the city is alive and active. Anyway, behind the stairwell of these buildings is usually the bathroom and kitchen, accessed with a key, just as the other part of the apartment is. This layout separates living functions and reduces unwanted smells and rodents from the comfortable front portion.
For us, however, our top floor apartment absorbed the stairwell on its floors and created one big apartment with a stairs running through it. So we enter through a metal door set right in the middle of the stairs leading to the third floor. I’ll admit that the entrance is a little ghetto as a result of it being a communal stairwell incorporated into the living space. It’s a series of security bars and metal sheets welded together and surrounded by sound insulation set up halfway up the stairs. But it has its charms too. As we approach our entrance, we get to look through the gap between the circling stairs to see down into the first floor apartment and shop, usually catching whiffs of conversation and Khmer music. The light shines up from below, enabling us to avoid fumbling with the lock.
Once inside and on the third floor landing, the apartment provides what other similar buildings can’t. The third floor of the building is the main living space for our apartment, with one back bedroom and a bathroom to the left of the top of the stairs and an office-like room, the kitchen, the living room, and the front balcony to the right. Continuing up the stairs leads you up to the fourth floor, where there is one bedroom and the rooftop terrace, which covers the rest of the footprint area. Obviously, someone at some point made some major alterations to the apartment in order to get the ideal set-up that it has. The kitchen was moved to the front (and we actually have an oven, an extreme rarity here), the stairs and hallway were brought into the apartment, skylights were put into the roof above the stairwell to illuminate the windowless central part of the apartment, walls were cut to provide pass-through and light between the kitchen and the living room, and the single upstairs bedroom was built onto the part of the balcony directly outside of the small fourth floor mudroom, guessing from the fact that the terra-cotta tiled patio floor is the same in the bedroom as outside. What used to be a small indoor space at the top of the stairwell and which led out to the front and back halves of the rooftop terrace now leads out to the rear balcony on one side and to my bedroom on the other, which itself leads out to the terrace through two big French doors.
The apartment itself very much has the feeling of what you picture an idealized version of an older apartment in the tropics of a developing country as looking like. I like to think that it could serve as one of the apartments in a Bourne movies where Matt Damon would live as he was spying in the local market. Except for the upstairs bedroom’s terra cotta tile floor, the floors are tiled with large, classic red and white checkerboard squares that have just enough scratches and dirt but also just enough smooth shine to give the whole apartment a very cool, colonial, older feel. Additionally, it helps that the living room is painted ochre yellow, with narrow, white trimmed windows that swing in to open. A large metal and glass door leads out to the small, plant-filled balcony from the living room. Even the bars across the windows create a pretty pattern when you look out through the glass of the windows, with the three elegantly clustered skinny metal strips converging to form squares about a six inches apart from each other in a grid pattern.
The apartment came furnished, and the dark wood coffee table and bookshelves, as well as the tiny potted plants hanging on wires from the 20-foot living room ceiling in the corners add to the whole aura of the place. Upstairs, the bedroom looks out through the two French doors and two small side windows onto the terrace over the living room and kitchen. It’s a bright room with a lot of light during the day and flowing, full length white curtains that hang on either side of the doors from a dark carved wood curtain rod. The view from when you enter this room from the top of the stairs makes the whole set-up look like a picture of where you’d want to live if you had no restrictions. The doors open up onto the rooftop terrace, with flowering plants laid out in pots along the two edges where the terrace meets the walls of the neighboring buildings. A subtly painted pattern on palm fronds is laid out in yellow on the white walls of the neighboring buildings behind these live plants. The patio up there feels quiet and removed from the bustle below, and as you walk out to the railing, you realize the openness of the view, and all of the surrounding sites come into your frame of sight. It’s hard to describe how great it feels to be up there and how much it is as if the top bedroom is just a little concrete hut places on top of the roof among the jungle of potted plants. It’s like one of the Architectural Digest stories about the rooftop apartments currently being built on top of many of New York’s apartment buildings, only tropical and, I’ll admit, probably not as architecturally significant. At night, it feels great to sit out on a chair and look out into the quite and up at the stars.
The back terrace is more for hanging laundry, and it simply looks out over the surrounding tin roofs. But even that view has character, and you can see out over the entire neighboring temple if you stand near the edge, just as the front terrace provides a view of the palace, museum, colonial architecture, buildings of Street 19, and Independence Monument off in the distance.
The apartment could use a little work, as it’s pretty much been passed from expat to expat with little landlord intervention. Yet, at the same time, it’s developed a somewhat cool “bohemian” feel as a result (I hate to use that word and don’t think I’ve ever used it before, but it’s what keeps coming to mind). Two banjos hang from the yellow walls in the living room; woven straw mats line the hallways; framed posters and paintings have accumulated as they’ve been left by past residents; and a tea collection has developed with leaves from as far away places as Africa, brought as gifts from visitors swinging through. The bathroom doesn’t have a door but instead has silk Cambodian fabric hanging from an elegant dark wooden curtain pole above the doorway. Although the peeling paint adds to the overall charm when simply looking at the place from an aesthetic point of view, the place could use a paint job. But I’m willing to put a few dollars of my own into sprucing it up since we got it so cheap.
Our landlord has been out of the country for a few years, and his son simply collects the money. As a result, he’s both hands-off in terms of taking care of the place but also hasn’t raised the rents in a number of years. So we’re two of us now paying below market rent for an apartment that used to be rented affordably by one person. Michael, the previous tenant and the one who went to Thailand, simply passed us off as new roommates so that there was no excuse to raise the rents. As a result, though, we didn’t benefit from being able to request a list of thing from the landlord.
It took a while to get used to, but in looking at apartments here for so long, we realized that it’s completely acceptable and almost expected that a new tenant will ask the landlord to make changes before moving in, whether it’s getting more furniture or repainting the place or renovating a bathroom. Often, when we looked at places, the owners would ask us what things we thought we’d want them to do before moving in. But with the rent the way it is, I’m happy to find my own desk, hire a painter, and do a little rearranging myself. Additionally, it’ll be an experience in itself to both learn about how to care for an apartment and to do some renovations in Cambodia.
The one stipulation in our taking over the lease from Michael was that we keep on the housekeeper, Liep. We happily obliged. We’ve now met her, and she’s great. She doesn’t speak a word of English, but she likes smiling and talks to me as if I both understand everything she says and as if I hate silence. She has a friendly, bubbly personality that seems like it would brighten up any day. She comes on Mondays and Thursdays to clean, do laundry, and do dishes, and sometimes I have to remind myself that, in “the real world,” most 22 year olds don’t have their own housekeepers. Or moto drivers for that matter. On the other hand, I’ve been feeling very mature in taking over this apartment, learning where the gutters on the terrace get clogged sometimes, when to deliver the month’s rent, and how to pay an electric bill in Cambodia. Liep actually helps with that one. She picks up our electric bill for us every month, and we simply give her the money, which she then passes along. Similarly, she helps with our water jug delivery. Usually, when people run out of water, they call the company, which will then take about two days to make the delivery and requires that you be in your place so that they can pick up the empties. Liep, however, knows someone at the water company that we use, so we give her one of our phones to call (as she doesn’t have one), and the new jugs arrive within an hour or two.
Michael trusts Liep incredibly and had nothing but great things to say about her. She has the keys to all of the locks in the house, and I get the feeling that, if I needed something, she’d be the person to go to. In fact, my guess is that she’d already know when we’d need something or when something went wrong in the apartment and would probably take care of it before we even realized it. She also had nothing but great things to say back about Michael. We might have to prove ourselves with our own kindness in order to get out from under his shadow. The two got connected after Michael had been living in the apartment for a while. Having been in Cambodia for a few years, he speaks Khmer pretty well, and one of the older women living nearby approached him one day to ask if he could use Liep for any jobs. At the time, she was selling ice in the courtyard. He acquiesced, essentially increasing her salary multiple-fold and providing a steady income. Both have found it a wonderful situation since.
Well, that’s the long of it. I’m having trouble sitting still, as I’m still trying to get used to the new place. I keep walking around, just basking in the fact that I’m no longer confined to one bedroom and have all of this space to myself. No more annoying voices in the guesthouse lobby or always having other people around wherever I go. I also keep sneaking out onto the terrace, just because I’m so excited to have my own outdoor space, which was one of my hopes for the year here. I’m looking forward to long reads in the sun or inviting people over to watch the sunset. I just need to make a trek down to the furniture area of town. I also feel really disoriented again, being in a completely new location at night, having all of my things temporarily back in duffel bags again, getting used to having to lock everything up extensively, and having other random things that I will slowly get used after the first few days.
This was a long one, but hopefully it’ll make up for the fact that I will be backlogged on entries as a result of not yet having internet in the apartment.