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.

Bernard sprained his ankle getting off his stool a little too fast. He walks away with a splint, a three-day hospital room, a fridge stocked with smuggled beer, and the deep conviction that he narrowly escaped death.

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.

Sabine preaches happy simplicity to 47,000 followers from her lovely condo with shared pool. She has a cleaning lady and only ever travels by air-conditioned taxi. She calls it "living with less."

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.