AIA#72 Neighbourhood drama, Suburban Aesthetics and Cambodia Travel Stories

After six counties and ten years it’s been something of an adventure and maybe I’ll write a book about it all one day.

I remember coming home back in 2012. I had been out of the country fro 2.5 years and had lived in Thailand, Korea and Saudi Arabia. During that time I had done some travelling in South East Asia. I took a bus from Phnom Penh to Thailand. On the way we stopped at a restaurant (More like an out door shack) to eat. Near the restaurant was a woman and her child. I soon realised that she lived outside in a similar shack like set up as the restaurant. I’ll never forget that seeing her. “How did she survive out there in the middle of nowhere? How did she feed her child?” I thought.

After I returned home to the US, I stayed with my parents for a week. They had a very nice home in a nice area of town. One day in the morning my parents told me about two neighbours that were having a dispute about a car that was always parked in the street. One of them didn’t like it because it was aesthetically displeasing. It was a very nice car and brand new.

It all seemed very trivial to me. It was just a car for Christ sakes.

I couldn’t understand people that had everything yet were so unhappy because I don’t believe the car in the street was the problem. I believe “Unhappiness” was the problem.
My parents had lived there for 20 years and cars in the street were never a problem.
I thought about the women in Cambodia at that moment and what she was doing.

What would she think of the car in the street and the neighbour’s dispute?