In Cambodia, waiting for a light to turn green is a social gathering.

People jocky for position, inching forward to occupy every possible centimeter of the coveted real estate towards the front of the pack. The scooters weave their way forward, snaking between the less maneuverable cars and tuk-tuks. Those making a right turn just cut through the gas station, dodging between the pumps and attendants.

A small community forms; people strike up conversations, eavesdrop on other’s cell phone chats, comment on the weather, talk about politics. Some retreat to their helmets, visors closed, maintaining a illusion of privacy. Others unsuccessfully try to ignore the beggars or newspaper vendors; curious children always stare at any nearby foreigners. For sixty seconds, a small human microcosm of community is maintained.

Then, as the light changes, it dissolves as quickly as it was created.

This isn’t a perfect image, by any means; but I like how it conveys how tightly packed the traffic is while waiting at stoplights. It’s a 9 image panorama, stitched in Photoshop.

My Alexa Rank is in!

My Alexa rank is finally in; this site’s been up for fewer than 3 months, so I’ve been checking every once in a while to see if Alexa will finally get around to ranking me.

So we started at around 19 million (not a great start), but we’ve been advancing every couple of days. As of today our global ranking is 4,800,000-ish. Not bad for two months or so. Our rating in our home country, Cambodia, is in the 1,200-13,000 area; now if we can just break 1,000…. Thanks to all of you for helping us out!

If any fellow bloggers feel like writing a review of ethancrowley.com on Alexa (here’s the link, click on the “reviews” tab), I’ll gladly review your blog back, and we can help each other out in the rating a bit. Fun stuff!

Please feel free to share my images—they are meant to be seen! Use them for your non-profit, on your blog, for fun and the like, but please link to www.ethancrowley.com and give credit to Ethan Crowley. All of my images are Creative Commons, Non-Commercial

Tags: cambodia, Kampuchea, Phnom Penh, Photography, streets, Travel Photography