The Battambang minivan mobile market is back again, and this time we spent almost $25 stocking up vegetables, fruit, and tofu.
Just In The Nick Of Time ⌛
It's been nearly two weeks since the mountaintop minivan market came to visit us. There are various hawkers and sellers occasionally passing by every day, but they are mostly selling things at higher than local market prices. For this reason we always try to hang tight and wait for the minivan from Battambang to serve our needs.
Battambang is a very agricultural part of Cambodia, with many fruit and vegetable farms in addition to plenty of rice fields. There is a long dirt road that connects us to this province, and this guy and his wife are able to make the several hours drive to us and undercut the prices of locals providing the same goods. They need the income more than the locals, and we need better prices to stretch our hard-earned modest income, so it's a match made in heaven.
Being Openly Sick Is Cool Again 🤒
@Srey-Yuu is still a bit sick, well we are on some level, but she is the best at outwardly expressing her sickness because she's a teenager 😁. Although she wasn't part of the shopping process, she got out of bed to come and stand in the middle of the humans, so yeah, suck it COVID-19, being normal sick is cool again. It's cool to see the attitude and COVID fears are basically gone here locally, and now it seems this season's local flu bug isn't creating any kind of panic or news, just some good old-fashioned sick like pre-COVID times.
To avoid repeating the style of the pics taken in a previous post about this minivan, I decided to climb on top of the retainer wall and take shots from different angles. Mey-Yii, our unofficial 5th family member, and Monkey-B were already above, so I thought I could coerce them into a photo together.
Retainer Wall Homies 👯♀️
Oddly enough these two wanted a photo together, kind of surprising because they have a love-hate relationship, and I never know when they're gonna be feeling some "I hate your face" vibes towards each other. Down below they are weighing up kilos and double-checking, triple-checking shopping lists, because a holiday is approaching, and it could be several weeks before they return.
Potatoes Finally 🥔
I've asked for potatoes on the last three visits, and this time they stocked up. It's the rainy season now, so potatoes are scarce and priced higher than normal, so it's hard for them to find profit margins. I told them I'd gladly pay a little more, so it's nice to see they took me for my word, and we snagged a couple kilos. Unfortunately the fruit was all gone and/or spoken for. We can't expect much, we are at the tail-end of this guy's roundtrip journey, lucky they have anything at all left when they reach us.
In the previous post about these folks, I translate the Korean text on the van and learned that this van had a former life transporting martial artists to martial arts school and tournaments, so hi-yah 🥋! Maybe some day the spirits of the past will enter my body and cause me to drop-kick a cucumber across the highway. Oh, extra tidbit of info, I asked the family what they do on the return trip, knowing surely they wouldn't simply drive back empty handed.
They buy up recycling scraps and transport them to a processing facility along the way, not earning much at all from that, but it's quick and easy, so why not hustle up a few extra bucks, right? Alright, that's all I got for now folks, to be continued.....
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