Face of the Day

Brown Cafe, Street 214, Phnom Penh

Camboda's Best Beers?

The best beers of Cambodia

The following are the highest rated beers brewed in Cambodia as they appear in the ranks at RateBeer.com. 

Cambodian Rice Voted Number One

"Cambodia’s aromatic variety of jasmine rice was awarded top prize at the Rice Trader World Rice Conference in Bali, Indonesia, last month.

Second and third place went to Thai rice varieties, as more than 40 rice-exporting countries attended the conference, from Sept. 26 to Sept. 28.

The rice variety was judged on its overall quality, including texture, shape, flavor and aroma. It is one of four varieties of rice that Cambodian exporters sell abroad."
~VOA Khmer

Slightly Interesting Cambodian Facts (2) Rice Consumption

Cambodians eat, on average, 152 kilograms of rice a year.

That makes them the world's 6th top consumer of rice per capita.

Brunei heads the world's rice-eating list list with its citizens plowing their way through 245 kilograms of the grain. They are followed by the Vietnamese (166kg), the Laotians (163kg), the Bangladesh (160 kg), and the Burmese who chow down on 157 kilograms of rice.

~Source:http://www.irri.org

Beer Girls Strike

"My Country, My Beer" claims Cambrew Ltd, the makers of Angkor beer.  


Cambrew employs hordes of girls to promote its grog at restaurants and nightclubs up-and-down the country.


 Often they have to drink with customers to ensure they keep on buying. So, sometimes you'll see the unedifying site of young, vulnerable, beer girls, from conservative Cambodian homes, knocking back way too much liquor for the enjoyment of relatively wealthy, chauvinistic, packs of Cambodian men. It's not a pretty sight.


In early July, the Cambodian Arbitration Council ruled than these girls should be paid overtime and back pay, for working on Sundays. The company refuses to pay. 


So, some of the girls have gone on a noisy strike. 


The amount in question? $2 for every Sunday worked. 


The Carlsberg Group, owns 50% of Cambrew.


I feel a Leo, coming on.

KFC - It's all about the Chicken

We had the girls over to stay again on Saturday night, and this time thought we would try them out on one of the recently opened KFC outlets - the first major international fast food chain to hit Cambodian shores, and here over a year already.

For them, it was all about the chicken. They love it. Chilli sauce - a must on the side.
For me, it was all about the fries.

It was great to see them watching what everyone else had. Sometimes just being out around other people enjoying themselves is half the fun.

Dying for a Drink

'CAMBODIA’S environmental policies are the worst in the Asia Pacific region, according to a new global report that placed the Kingdom at number 148 of 163 countries,' reports The Phnom Penh Post.

'The 2010 Environment Performance Index (EPI), compiled by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities in the US, quantifies the environmental impacts of a country’s policies by assessing 25 factors, and then assigns each country a corresponding value of zero to 100, with 100 the most positive rating. Cambodia received an overall EPI rating of 41.7.'

Access to clean drinking water in rural areas is one of Cambodia's main environmental problems; only 42% of rural Cambodians can access water that is considered likely to be safe to drink. Dodgy water can bring on cholera,and acute watery diarrhoea which is the second most common cause of deaths for kids under 5.

That's a disgrace; billions of dollars of overseas aid- both private and government-to-government- have flowed into Cambodia over the last decade. What did they do with it all? It sure hasn't gone into making sure that those in the countryside can have a decent drink.