Bernard pays in cash. Always. It is, along with the stool and the refusal to walk, one of the three pillars of his civilisation.

Gaston knows dozens of lines from French films of the 1960s and 70s by heart. He pulls them out pretty much constantly, often with little connection to the situation at hand, and sometimes in front of people who simply don't speak French. That never stops him.

Baptiste has occupied the same table at the same café for eight hours this morning. A two-dollar cold brew, a MacBook open across twelve tabs, and a Web3 project that, according to him, is going to "change the game for the whole country." He hasn't looked up from his screen yet.

Bernard's brother Michel lands in Phnom Penh for the first time. Bernard, eight years of seniority and a stool molded to his own backside to his name, gets ready to play seasoned guide. He doesn't yet know that Michel took two years of Mandarin in college and picked up a bit of Khmer out of curiosity before the flight.

Brigitte has moderated the Facebook group "Expats in Cambodia" for four years. She's never met most of its 47,812 members. She does, however, know exactly where to find the best comté in Phnom Penh, down to the gram.

Bernard decided, one Saturday, to "make the most of the residence pool." Six Anchors later, the pool is mostly making the most of him.

Bernard has sung the same Khmer song at the same karaoke bar for three years. He still doesn't understand a single word of it. In his own eyes, he's a local star — a title that, in his mind, now sits right alongside King of the Bar Stool.

Régis spent twenty years bouncing between unemployment and odd jobs in the South of France. At forty-three, he lands in Cambodia and becomes, somewhere over the course of a Paris-Phnom Penh flight, an "international development strategy expert." His accent, for its part, made the trip without losing a single syllable — and has, if anything, gotten considerably thicker since.

Bernard arrived in Cambodia eight years ago. He never left. Neither did his belly. Bernard orders his Anchor at 4pm sharp, knows every bartender's name going back to 2018, and for the past six months, he's even found love. Well, a version of love. And you hear him before you see him.

This text, originally published on social media, is signed by Raoul M. Jennar, an observer of Cambodia since 1989. A recognized specialist on Southeast Asia and particularly on Cambodian-Thai relations, the author offers here a critical and engaged analysis of the ongoing border conflict between Cambodia and Thailand.

Gilbert has never received a single invitation card in ten years. Yet he attends every diplomatic reception in Phnom Penh, without exception, with the reliability of a conscientious civil servant — except nobody ever hired him for the job. Nobody quite knows how he gets in. He himself never tells it the same way twice.

Brandon booked his flight on a Thursday night, somewhere between his second glass of white wine and a documentary about street children in Phnom Penh. By Friday morning he'd already ordered the polo shirt. Eight days later he comes home changed for life — just not quite the way he thinks.

Angkor has its temples, Sihanoukville its beaches, and Cambodia, every year, its parade of visitors from Europe. They don't all look alike. An attempt at classification, with no scientific pretensions, drawn from patient observation in the markets, in tuk-tuks, and by the poolside.

A chronicle of a conservation expedition in northeastern Cambodia, where science occasionally gave way to olfactory marketing. A true story — names have been changed to protect the anonymity (and dignity) of those involved.

My old friend Ta Sâr's family has grown again. Three days later, the time had come to find a name for the child. The grandson of my friend was baptized "the old way." An original and nearly vanished method today of naming a newborn.

The controversy surrounding Koh Muoy and Koh Ky is not just a matter of official denial: it also reveals the fragility of public trust in the era of social media.

While some French-language media outlets based in Thailand relayed— with enthusiasm seemingly outweighing fact-checking —the story of a “Cambodian casino” allegedly serving as an arms cache, the photographed scene tells a very different story.

With over twenty years of experience in tourism and gastronomy development, Arnaud Darc has been observing from Phnom Penh the evolution of a sector vital to the national economy. In his analysis of 2025, he makes a clear assessment: Cambodian tourism hasn’t undergone a collapse, but a brutal exposure of its structural fragilities.

The hours of traffic jams in the capital in the evening can be ‘hammering’, unbearable but sometimes almost poetic. To put it plainly, on...

« Cinq pour cent des bénéfices du bar seront reversés à une action caritative locale ». « Notre établissement soutient un programme...