Culture

In the midst of excitement during a game or a sporting event, safety is not on top of the minds of participants and spectators.  In the thrill of a cockfight, breeders, caretakers and gamblers may disregard the risk of contracting avian flu.

This is why in Lao PDR, cockfighting arenas are banned by the authorities in big cities like Vientiane. They are allowed only in remote communities, where it is easier to screen the animals. Authorities from both Laos and Thailand have also prohibited the transporting of birds across the Lao-Thai border.

PHNOM PENH - While English remains the most popular foreign language among students in Cambodia, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are fast catching up as young Khmers increasingly view them as a gateway to better jobs in the country’s growing industrial and tourism sectors.

BANGKOK -- Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. What images might these words conjure up in the minds of international consumers of news? Perhaps war, maybe the Khmer Rouge. Or they might say, ‘Oh, it’s that those countries that had that war some time ago. . . they’re near one another, and they’re all the same’. 

SVAY CHRUM, Cambodia – A flurry of bicycles starts from 6 a.m. onwards in Chambak and Kruos communes in this district in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province, on the border with Vietnam. Drivers pedal frantically toward the Tanou border post, named after the stream that separates the two countries.

Cambodia has buried the hatchet with its Vietnamese neighbour, but many scars remain today from centuries of conflict, and the occupation of the Kingdom during the decade that followed the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge by forces of the NUFSK (National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea) and soldiers from Hanoi. Today, the often-silent discrimination against the Vietnamese people has gotten the better of more than one mixed marriage between Cambodians and Vietnamese.

 

QUANG TRI, Vietnam – Ho Long’s family farm has 2,000 banana trees, from which they can pick some 20 bunches of the fruit each day. But unlike other families, Ho Long does not sell the harvested bananas in his mountain farm. Instead, twice a day, he hops on his Minsk motorbike and drives some five kilometres to the crossroads to sell their produce.

Last year, four theater groups got together to plan how to make an impact on the Thai contemporary theatre scene. Now, the plan is in operation, and a number of small theatre spaces have emerged around Bangkok. The question is: How big will this impact be? Paul Chen finds out.

Many women in Thailand’s theatre industry have not always stepped up to the challenge of writing and directing their own plays. Paul Chen talks to four of them that have, and are inspiring others to do so through the Women in the Moon Festival. 

PHNOM PENH, Jun 6 (Newsmekong) - It was just 8 a.m. on a Sunday
morning, but 78-year-old farmer You Song had visited almost all the
places inside the Royal Palace here in the Cambodian capital.

It was more than a century ago, in 1901, that French colonialists began to build a railway from Hai Phong in Vietnam to Kunming, in China’s south-western Yunnan province. By the time the railway construction reached the terminal in Kunming, it was Mar. 31, 1910.