Water Festival

Dear All,

Excuse-me for not writing in a long time. I've had a lot of work, and it's going to get worse with time now, as we approach the date of the inauguration of the Center: December 4th.

We have finally ordered all the computer equipment for the "consultation" room, i.e. the terminals which will allow the public to do their own querying into the database; the furniture will be made very soon.

I've had a bad start of the week: the main production server refused to boot on Monday morning. We switched to the backup but in the night, a script erased the database with a backup from Friday night. So we thought all the work of Monday had been lost. Fortunately we made a copy of the database for an other purpose late in the afternoon Monday and we recovered from that copy.

The French Cultural Center will screen the Foreign Ministry's selection of documentaries on Globalization. "Probably a lot against America but not a word on French multinational companies", my father would say.

The King of Cambodia will apparently visit France this month, 100 years after his grandfather King Sisowath and 40 years after De Gaulle visited Cambodia in 1966.

Tonight in the Center, the archivists each introduced and showed us a video from the database. We got a glimpse of life in 1962 during the "golden years" of Cambodia known as Sangkum Reastr Niyum, an interview of Sihanouk on neutrality and Laos, the horrors of civil war in 1974, something just before the Vietnamese army withdrew in 1989 and a document on attacks by the Khmer Rouge against Battambang as late as 1990 (the year before the Peace Agreements).
It was fascinating.

I have moved to street 21, a small street which looks very rural in that section, I like it. It's not final though, I still need to find my own place.

And last but not least, the Water Festival is approaching! It will be, from what I hear, crazy in Phnom Penh: a million visitors from all over the country, added to the 1.2 million inhabitants, boat races on the Tonle Sap and the Mekong, fireworks, and more! The Festival lasts from Saturday til Monday but Tuesday and Thursday are also off so it will be hard to get something done at work, I'd better get away for a few days like everybody. Where to? Kampot? Mondulkiri? Ho Chi Minh City?

Cheers,

Joseph