Miracle on Norodom Boulevard

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I walk home each night. It's a several mile walk, but when you are living off three dollars a day, you have to be careful about how you spend each one. I can't afford to spend a dollar to and from work every day.

This past week, Beeline, the phone company, has been hosting some sort of promotional New Year's party. They put the festivities out on the sidewalk of one of the streets I cross.

And over this promotional sidewalk, snow fell. It fell and accumulated an inch on the ground; non-sexual security guards danced in it and tried to catch it; folks took pictures of it with their mobiles.

That's right, somebody actually set up a snow machine so that we too can have a white winter in Phnom Penh. Given that Cambodia is apparently a tropical third world country, I am kind of impressed. For a minute, I thought I was back in Dubai.

I hope our small snowfall does something to alter the idea that we live in a miserable rat hole here, suffering from cholera and the black plague on a daily basis. Somebody (who probably couldn't locate Cambodia on a map) was trying to argue with me on a message board that this is what my life should consist of in Phnom Penh--but I want to know how many times he has seen a snow machine.

*I walked past the next several nights with my camera just trying to get a picture of it, but I didn't see the machine again.

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