I love SE Asian coffee. They make it very strong and add condensed milk, so it is both very bitter and very sweet. The Western-style coffee shops are expensive by local standards. A large latte here is $3. I can buy coffee from a street vendor for about 50 cents.
The food is also very good and relatively cheap for a Western-style coffee shop. About once a week I go to a coffee shop to do internet nerd stuff and satisfy my urge for frou-frou Western coffee.
However, because it is Western or, more to the point, modern it has also become a hotspot for well-to-do Cambodians. It's becoming increasingly popular with the local nouveau riche. The problem here, as is true everywhere else on Planet Earth, is that people who have just come into money have no effing clue how to act in public.
Please understand, I am not slagging Cambodians or even rich Cambodians. One of my pet peeves is people who move to a foreign country and then constantly criticize it and its people.
The problem with these people is {insert offensive stereotype here}. This place is never going to get any better until they learn to {insert misinformed and unrealistic observation here}.
No, instead I am slagging people with new money everywhere who act like jackasses. I am merely pointing out the Cambodian flavor of this phenomenon.
Because of the bizarre historical nightmare of the Khmer Rouge, the resulting civil war and the epically inept United Nations peacekeeping efforts, Cambodia's development is decades behind its bigger, more populous neighbors, Vietnam and Thailand. The buzzword here, as mentioned above, is modern. Anything modern is good. There is a fascination with Western culture, especially American, but there is also fascination with the technology of Japan and Korea, for instance.
The local nouveau riche come to Brown to show off their toys. In the loudest manner possible. The other way to show off your newfound wealth is to buy a big-ass SUV. This is one of the few cities I've been where Hummers are common. It's also a city where there is no parking. This phenomenon deserves its own post. Heck, I could write a book about traffic in Cambodia.
The celphone networks here don't always play well together, so it's not uncommon to see people with more than one celphone. I should say that in the past the mobile networks weren't always compatible, so people needed multiple phones. These days most of those technological problems are gone so carrying multiple phones is done more as an affectation and display of wealth than out of any genuine need. And, like everywhere else in the world, people who have iPhones brandish them conspicuously, as if they just won a gold medal at the Olympics.
One day I was sitting here next to a table of four men. Two of them were older, stocky men with crewcuts who pay people to drive them around in monster SUVs. They're cut from a mold. The odds are they are cops, government bigwigs, gangsters, or some combination of the three.
The older men mostly sat there like statues, looking and feeling important while their younger companion talked on his celphone. Sorry, celphones. He probably didn't need to use a phone because he was talking so loud. You may have heard him from where you're reading this. The point, of course, was to impress everyone within earshot how important he is. He does, after all, own four celphones!
(I had to surreptitiously take these photos with my phone so please excuse the quality.)You can see the latest iPhone model on the table in front of him. Very important that you see that... It's the most modern iPhone. See it? He would frenetically switch from one phone to another as if he were coordinating the Normandy invasion and trying to get orders to his generals. And yes, to answer your question, he did in fact have conversations on more than one phone at the same time. I think I permanently damaged my eardrums turning up the sound in my eardrums to drown out his barking. All to no avail.
As I sit here four young Khmer guys are sitting across from me. Each has an Apple laptop prominently displayed on the table. The one closest to me is playing Korean boy-band videos. The others are whoopin' and hollerin' like they're at the concert, and not in a busy restaurant.
Morons.
To truly understand how annoying this is you must be familiar with Korean pop. I pray for your sake that you are not. I'll write about it in a future post. This is painful enough for now.
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