Category — food and land

Here’s a video I took at Pyongyang restaurant in Phnom Penh. Dragged along a couple of friends to check the place out after hearing about it again and again from curious expats. It’s North Korean owned and run. The performers and wait-staff were all North Korean as well, though I wish I could learn more about the story of how they are chosen, what their lives are like once they’re hear, how they’re trained…

I don’t know much about the North Korean relationship with Cambodia. Something to look into.

Funny, when I mentioned something about it on Facebook, a friend who hadn’t been in touch for a long time thought I was going to the real place.

We were driving through Ontario the other weekend, past car dealerships and strip malls and concrete dividers and I got this image in my mind of the Inland Empire way before the orange groves, before the Mormon settlements, before the Spanish settlers when the Serranos and Cahullia Indian tribes lived in the San Bernadino valley. It must have been beautiful.

Our family friend, John told me about being out in the area and taking biking trips out to wineries through the backs of fields back in the 70s. Apparently not all the freeways were around back then and you could get from place to place without your Suburban (or in our case, Honda) .

I went digging a bit and turned up this map from the California Dept of conservation on land-use change in Chino from 1984 to 2008. How fascinating.

Check out the way the green turns pink. Within the image area, more than 12,500 acres were removed from agricultural uses, and urban land increased by more than 17,000 acres.

Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program
1984 to 2008 TIME SERIES