The traffic lights in Phnom Penh flash amber after midnight, blink blink blink, amber amber amber, no red no green, No stop or go, traffic lights as suggestions, the Phnom Penh way
Khmer cable, shows bootleg copies of Hollywood blockbusters, cheap, $2.50 bootleg copies of all the new releases. Usually you get half a movie, 20 minutes and then they change it or it crashes or it freezes or it returns to the opening menu the technicians asleep or taking a piss or playing cards oblivious as you stare at the opening credits for the third time. They never miss the sex scenes though, they fast forward through the steamy stuff , the result is absurdly high speed sex action. They showed the unforgiven the other week, forty minutes in they changed the language to French. Clint Eastwood parlez-vous Français?
Phnom Penh has no public bus service, and yet it’s the most convenient place to live, everyone’s a potential moto taxi driver. Everyone could do with a little extra money. It’s almost impossible to walk down the road without someone pulling up and asking “moto?” No standing in bus stops in the biting cold, no being late for work because you missed the bus, no walking home because the last bus has gone. Just “moto”.
And this, finally is the reason we stay, Phnom Penh is a simple town, a small convenient town, fifteen minutes by bike from one end to the other. Yes, a simple town, not yet host to the huge impersonal corporations that stain the cities of the West. We have no McDonalds, No Burger King . No Kentucky fried Chicken or Wendy's or Dunkin Doughnuts. No 7/11s on every corner, no Kmart or Multiplex. no chain department Megastores, just the simplicity of a small poor city in a small poor country.