[hnsight_roo]

(05-20-2014 04:35 AM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  

(05-18-2014 10:40 PM)Vacancier Permanent Wrote:  

BB,
Since you've spent some time now in Cambodia, would be interesting to have your thoughts on it. And also, which parts of the Cedo retro article on Cambodia you don't agree with.

Here's the link again for proper cred: http://cedonulli.com/the-cambodia-retrospective/

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now that i’m out of there, let’s finally talk about cambodia.

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also, you don’t want to talk like this while you’re living there.

First off, I do agree about not talking too much about Cambodia while you're here, but I'll throw out some answers anyways, since I don't think I'm quite as debaucherous as he is. I'd still like to refrain from going into too much detail.

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it’s a country that you more or less can’t avoid, if you’re doing some living-across-se-asia. which, i say, is really the only way to properly do any of this business. traveling is bogus. showing up somewhere for a week or two? meeeh. other than a scouting mission, that just does nothing any justice. six months, if the place has any merit at all. two years, if it’s just totally banging.

I disagree with this. You don't need six months or more to know a place...

haha Okay, just fucking with you. You know my take on this - completely agree 100%.

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1. the cheapest, cheapest, teen-age-est, desperate-est, girls. if you want to spend five bucks to fuck a seventeen year old hottie with endless legs for a few hours, cambodia. she’ll spend the night to have a place to sleep. feed her some soup, buy her a t-shirt, and she might never want to leave. and she’ll bring her girl friends, too.

This is brutal. I don't do this.

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2. also, the country has infrastructure. 3G internet. minimal to no power outages. clean water. good roads. imported goods, from land rovers to swiss army knife company stores. apartment highrises with rooftop pools. it’s not nearly as backwater as some would make you believe.

3. and then, it’s fucking safe. keep out of the five block tourist radius, and it’s safer than most anywhere.

Agree to all of the above.

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4. nightlife. granted it’s mostly semi-pros and whatnot,

Depends on the nightlife. This is extremely simplistic.

This is an entire country he's referring to here. It's hardly all pros.

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you can go out seven nights a week and barely spend an extra couple hundred a month

If you stick to small beer bars where only locals go - and I do love these little places - you can get small jugs of beer for $1.50 to $2. But any worthwhile discos or even foreigner spots and you're paying quite a bit more. At the nice discos, you may be paying $5 a beer. I suppose if you hardly drink at all when you go out, you could get by on his budget, but let's be realistic. Most guys aren't going to have the self-control to do that.

Not to mention that if you drink with the type of girls he mentions, you'll be footing their bills too.

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that’s only phnom penh of course, but outside of the capital it’s pretty much just cows and huts anyway.

Nah. Every city has its nightlife. Over all a quiet place, but there's more out there than just PP.

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6. there’s no law to speak of. money is law. and if by money i mean three dollars.

You will be paying more than three bones if you get in any half-serious trouble with the law. You'll fork out about three bones when you get stopped riding your motorbike, but anything more serious and you better dig a little deeper.

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five star hotels with shit service.

There's some shit service in a lot of places, but there are also places with great service. I took Fisto to a place that was nice but not 5-star, and I think he'll attest the service was on par.

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it’s like monkeys took over civilization.

Dude, I'm no crusader for being PC but enough with the "monkeys" shit. These people have been to hell and back. Give them a fucking break already.

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nobody has game.

Some of my Khmer friends have some pretty solid game and bang the shit out of white chicks. Some of the others bang the hell out of local broads.

Like anywhere, you get guys with game and game without. I will admit that game here more often means money, but that's not always the case.

No offense to the writer (I know he's a member here) as again, I like his stuff, but these are truisms.

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traditional culture means no premarital sex whatsoever.

A lot of conservative women here - much like unbeaten paths in Thailand - but things are loosening up. Some of the girls with money are somewhat adventurous, though they'll put on airs. A lot of the uni girls, locals tell me, are quite sexually liberated and/or hanging out with older local guys to get shown around town and pampered.

The economy is growing fast, and times are changing.

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they have zero money, so they don’t go out.

There are plenty of girls with money now that go out. Some of the high-class girls are even keen on barang. More so, I'd say, than high-class Thais.

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you don’t find girls in day game situations. i spent countless hours at the malls, outdoor places, everywhere. if they’re not girls for sale in one form or another (and many, many are), it’s just a no-go.

Plenty of nice-looking girls at the malls. It's not Thailand, but they are there.

Even better, work on the staff at upper class restaurants and clubs.

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and gaming the good girls is an exercise in absolute hair-pulling. can be done, but the end result isn’t worth it. i had one, she didn’t even know how to kiss. do you want to start at absolute zero? i thought it’d be fun. but it isn’t.

Define good girl. Yes, the real good girls are innocent and inexperienced, but that's also the case in Thailand (I actually prefer innocent and inexperienced - they always come around after some time). There are middle and upper class non-pro women here that travel, have experience with the opposite sex, and are interested in meeting men.

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and crappy sex. jakeface managed to pull a mix from fully good girl, to semi upstanding but western influenced samples, to all out teenage hookers. they all SUCK to fuck. you get used to basically jerking off into some (admittedly gorgeous bodied) thing under you. double, triple meh.

Not my experience at all - this kind of blew my mind to see him say this. I felt like this about a lot of Thai women I was with over the years. I don't want to go too much into this, but let's just say I find them more passionate here.

Interested to hear Fisto's take.

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and so, for the people. gentle, kind, curious. if you’re coming from a while in thailand, it’s nice to not be treated like idiot-whitey. more english speakers.

Agreed. The people way more friendly and curious about barang/farang.

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a year, max. after that, a talking parrot will seem magnitudes smarter than 95% of the humans you have local contact with.

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social life means a whole lot of no intellectual stimulation, a whole lot of no-gaming any girls, a whole lot of synaptic atrophy.

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good god, with the lack of brain function.

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but after all that wears off, you start to realize that there isn’t much going on upstairs. dudes partying just means getting shitfaced on beer.

A lot of this. But plenty of the moneyed people have great educations. I've met a lot of people who studied abroad, as well as people, poor and rich, who lived in America, or still live there part-time. Even some of the poor can be interesting to talk to when they do have some basic smarts - they are a lot more intellectually curious and eager to know about other cultures.

Don't get me wrong, most are lacking. Their country nearly beat itself into extinction, so some of this to be expected.

But good conversation is difficult to find in Thailand too.

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it’s a stop. it’s an opportunity to live like a total heathen. it’s a place to lay low and have fun on minimal financial resources. it’s the jungle.

Cambodia is what you make it. You can live a very high-class life here, up out of the dust and the dirt, or you can live a low-class life here. Both have their moments, and I tend to go back and forth myself, which is fun because most foreigners seem to pick one or the other.

Jake seems to have chosen the lower class scene. That's cool and I respect people who can roll like that. But let's not get it twisted - the economy is growing in leaps and bounds here and you do have other options.

Obviously, to all of that.

It's unlikely that any one person is going to have all possible experience, and reflect all possible experiences all others may have.

Almost all travelers I met in PP for example, hated Vietnam. I didn't hear one good thing about VN. Wen there just since it's next door - and loved it. So much so that I've got a permanent place there now.

To each their own.

Disagreeing with one thing though - the economy. I don't see Cambodia coming back. Do you follow the politics at all? It's mind blowing. Or maybe not ... either way, China owns anything worth owning there now anyway.