Gold Tower 42
Like Saigon, Phnom Penh is booming, and the Cambodian nouveau riche — as nouveaux riches are wont to do — is busily casting about for new ways to flaunt its wealth. To service this new demographic, an old government hospital at the intersection of Sihanouk and Norodom Boulevards has recently been flattened to make way...
Chamkarmon district
Phnom Penh is about two hours from the Vietnamese border, a trip broken only by a ubiquitous half-hour lunch stop and a short break at Neak Loung, where cars, buses, motos and pedestrians are borne across the Mekong on rusting ferries. Due to the abundance of foreign aid the highways here are well-sealed and, excepting...
TPHCM Phat Trien!
Since China’s economic rise, the ironies of ‘market socialism’ have become something of a staple of international journalism. Indeed, the story of socialism yielding to neoliberal economics can be sketched in sharp, simple contrasts: Mao and Motorola; Deng and Disney; Tiananmen and Toyota. But despite all of this — and all irony aside — I...
Reading Saigon
I’m sitting in my hotel off Bui Vien Street in central Saigon, exhausted from the early start and aching in the legs from today’s walk. I’m stealing wireless, achingly slow, from somewhere nearby; and my Windows taskbar is in a state of constant excitement, informing me, every few seconds, of connections granted and denied. My...
