[Remote Year] Welcome to Phnom Penh

December 2016 is the 11th month of Remote Year for RY2 Battuta and the 7th month for RY4 Magellan, and we are sharing the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia — the first time two RY groups are in the same place for a month.

Workspace

This month, we’re all working out of Emerald Hub, a coworking space in an office building that also houses a local university.

Housing

Both RY groups are spread across 3 apartment buildings — our roommates are in our same program, but the buildings are mixed between groups so it’s easier for us to meet and socialize.

Ironically, I am living in a building next door to the hotel I stayed in last year. What are the odds?

My mom and stepdad are flying over for Christmas (I am so so so excited), so I went out yesterday and bought a few decorations so that our apartment had a little of the holiday spirit.

City

Phnom Penh is a really interesting city with such a rich history:

• founded as a small city when Angkor was still the country’s capital
• became the capital after Angkor was destroyed in the 15th century
• abandoned for 350+ years
• reinstated as the capital in the 19th century and developed by French Colonialists
• evacuated in a death march by the Khmer Rouge (1975–79)
• reconstructed as the capital

There’s a strong French Colonial influence to the architecture, and from watching archival footage of the city, today’s city looks reminiscent of Phnom Penh of the 50s and 60s before the Vietnam War and Khmer Rouge altered the landscape and trajectory of the city and country.

To learn more, I recommend watching this film about the country’s history told through their rock’n’roll music of 1950–80. We saw it this week thanks to meeting the head of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. It’s available on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vimeo, etc.

It’s a challenging but wonderful place for a RY city: there’s pollution and terrible traffic, tuktuks and motor everywhere, cheap local food, more expensive but still affordable western food and comforts, beautiful textiles, Cambodian cultural performances, 4DX modern movie theaters, and more.

We can find both the gritty and “real” Asian/Cambodian goods and experiences while also easy havens of spas and good coffee and eggs benedict, for example.

Admittedly, many people in Battuta were a bit concerned about having to share a city with another group — less because we’re unfriendly and more because we’ve sometimes been too much on our own for some cities given our needs for housing, workspace, wifi bandwidth, etc for so many people.

I traveled to Phnom Penh last year as part of my 6-week SE Asia solo adventure, so I knew the city was probably big enough to cover our housing, but I shared the reservations about how everything would work with so many remotes in one place. I was also very sick when I was here before, so I wasn’t sure if PP would be a fun or ill experience this time around.

We sometimes joke that we’re not really Battuta, we’re Beta — because, as the second group, we’ve been subject to a lot of R&D for Remote Year.

The blessing of being the second group is we have a stronger voice in shaping the company and the active (and upcoming alumni) experience, we’ve tested waters that were both rough and friendly, and we forever get the badge of being an early adopter.

The other side of that coin is not having much of a model to follow and significantly less framework in place to facilitate this experience being everything it could be for networking and professional & personal development.

Over the course of our experience, RY has grown from 2–3 running programs to now having 6 active now and 17 starting next year.

The program leads have a bigger network to work with, and RY now has more staff and investors working to improve the company and programs.

We’ve watched other groups self-organize and develop events like RYx (TEDx inspired talks), The Moth, monthly positive impact / volunteering events, skillsharing sessions, lunch roulettes, and more.

15 days ago, I hadn’t met anyone from Magellan.

Dec 3–4 weekend, in Siem Reap to run the half-marathon at Angkor Wat, we coordinated a smaller meetup of 25 people between both groups.

Last week, we all arrived in Phnom Penh and moved into our shared apartment buildings and workspace.

Dec 9–11, I participated in a writers’ weekend with 5 Magellans and 2 other Battutas in Kep, a former French colonial beach resort town known for its crab.

So far, it’s been fun to share the city with another group, and it’s been a great insight into what future programs will experience.

The small group activities and city sharing have also shown me that the RY Alumni program has the potential to be very successful and valuable: we can meet & integrate quickly with an existing group, participate in activities together, learn from each other, and form new friendships.

(Meanwhile, Battutas are having all the feelings about our now 45-day countdown to the end of our Remote Year.)

Katherine is a digital nomad, working remotely while she travels the world — on the road since June 2014. She’s a member of Remote Year 2 Battuta, living around the world with 75 other digital nomads from February 2016 to January 2017.

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