Observing Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh feels like a pirate city.

Run-down facades next to a few formerly magnificent colonial buildings, stranded crooks, everyone wants to make a few riel, or better yet dollars. Some streets are unacceptable at night. Garbage everywhere, I identify 2 flattened rats only by their tails. Electric cable trees wrap entire intersections in a mesh. Men hold one nostril shut and blow their snot out the other onto the street. Fried tarantulas and snails are sold from small carts.

Pickup trucks with people (on chairs) riding on their transport surfaces, or nearly collapsing motos with entire plant stores hitched to them, cruise the streets. Old white men washing down sandwiches with beer in run-down bistros - at 12:00 noon. Cowboy hat wearing.

Skyscrapers neighboring ruins. Next to fancy cafes in the most modern quarters our noses are being spoiled by the smell of stinky puddles and garbage piles. Chicken feet, indistinguishable deep-fried snacks and unrefrigerated meat mix their smell to it. Monks walk along the promenade in the evenings, the richly golden decorated towers of the temples stick out behind unfinished 8-story buildings.

Small rowboats with corrugated iron shacks on the river - fishing with nets cast by hand - sail alongside large tankers and party boats with hung neon signs for the tourists. They do love their seafood here.

It seems like a city for lost souls if you haven't made it elsewhere... everything feels semi-legal and somehow dangerous.

White old men, wearing caps, strolling on narrow spindly legs, pale white. A beer belly sitting on top of them. Short grey hair, youthfully combed to hide bald spots. Cargo pants and socks in Birkenstocks. The most frequent accessory: thin cambodian women on high heels.

I wonder who is investing money here, I suspect westerners. Self-titled ‘adventurers’ whose skin color carries weight. (on every supermarket shelf you'll find whitening body lotion.) A metropolis that tries hard, but poverty and crime prevail. And the white pirates rejoice. They all seem like storytellers.

Shady guys scanning each womens body. I am glad to have changed my mind after breakfast and to have switched to long pants. Despite the blazing sun and fear of sunburn, I’ll wait for the other woman next to me to get up and walk away also, as not to leave her alone with the creeps.

Glancing over from the promenade into the streets, it still seems village-like. Lush trees block the view of the many small stores behind. Dozens of small tuktuks or motos with attached stores drive through. Megaphone announcements, neon signs, posters. Everyone is trying to attract attention. Phnom Penh feels like it is in rapid change, but no one knows where they are heading. Skyscrapers are going up, but who lives and works in them? Is this kind of development really supposed to combat poverty? Meanwhile, a local rattles through the garbage cans looking for something edible. he carries his findings in a black trash bag. Rumours say Phnom Penh is the city with the most luxury cars in Asia.

I am anticapitalist

Tourist waves are slowly washing ashore from Thailand and Vietnam, even if only for Angkor Wat. Childish, naive radiated grin, bike shorts and high sport socks in sneakers or adilettes. Staky legs leaking out of too short pants. pearl necklaces. Business students who will later brag: 'Cambodia was gnarly man! But everyone was so friendly!' He probably never talked to the locals. Backpacks packed to the rafters, not a word of Khmer, Straw hat with perfectly shaved beard, no knowledge of political events. Too loud, the American accent squeaks in my ears. Sweet braided hairstyles held together with oversized rubbers. Gymboys next to Party Animal. Being noisy in a 4bed dorm at 5am.

Weighty conversations about management over a coffee at the next table by 23 year olds. One of them gets up, scratches his crotch. His shoulders pulled back, he struts through the lobby with his sweater wrapped around his hips.

I am having lunch in a cafe and observe the hustle outside. The limousines with darkened windows that creep through the veins of Phnom Penh next to the scrapped tuktuks. The poor have no money because it is stuck in elite circles. The rich stay in power because money sets the rules of the game. Equality is established in the law, but theory and practice are as far apart as rich and poor.

I am anti-capitalist