2008-09-23 - Beautiful Shoes

On the tour de Phnom weekend a bit ago, one of the stops was a place called Beautiful Shoes, where they measure you up and make custom shoes for you. I signed up for 2 pairs, and today was pickup day. The certainly look snazzy, and fit nicely in the shop, but will do some test driving and see.

Also have another 2 types of street vendor – this time it’s the pan man and the subway man.

Pan is French for bread stick or something like that, and the pan man rides the streets on his pushie with a big basket of fresh bread rolls on the back. It’s even warm when it comes out of the basket, dunno how he achieves that. The pan man in the photo is the manual pan man, who shouts out “oooooooooh pan”, while there is also the automatic pan man, who has a little loudhailer and a looped recorded message which goes for about 15 seconds.

The subway man has a cart with pan and lots of ingredients – you tell him what you want and he makes a bread roll for you. Haven’t tried this one yet – most of the “meat-like” ingredients are foamy cubed stuff that looks a little strange.

Pan man chatting to subway man

Other news is that it’s Pchum Ben here next week, which means festival of the ancestors. Everyone goes back to their province at some point to visit the relos, and also to give food to the monks in the Wats (temples), as the monks can’t leave the Wats during the festival. That means 3 days of official public holiday, and in the case of CARE the office shuts for the whole week. I’ve taken the hint and booked a river tour to Vietnam, starting on Saturday and ending up in Ho Chi Minh on Tuesday. Will then wander around Vietnam for a few days, eventually arriving back in Phnom Penh by that Sunday (hopefully).