A fascinating week in Phnom Penh! Last Sunday I happened in on our local supermarket (yes we have two major chains supported largely by middle and upper-middle class Khmer and by the large no HUGE ex-patriate community) and had to pass through the connected KFC. (Yes, we have that brand name here along with Starbucks coffee sold in upscale tea parlors.) Lo and behold who is in there accompanied by an middle class Khmer but an American Buddhist monk. It was easy to tell the man was American. His accent was so thick it could cut Wisconsin cheese.

I had always assumed that monks had a vegetarian diet. Apparently not this one. Of course, since monks don't carry money the Khmer customer next to him paid. And as I've written before, monks don't eat after noon. This one was well within safety limits by his showing up at the Colonel's at 11 a.m.

Speaking of brand names, I gotta tell you how disappointed I am that franchises of US owned companies are moving in. KFC isn't so blatant as it is a franchise of the Malaysian chain. But the sale of Starbucks is particularly disappointing since Cambodia has a number of local brands of coffee that drinkers tell me are more than adequate to fill any bean lover's pallate. Isn't it bad enough that Apple has a reseller here? I mean they even sell iPhones in the store, even though there is no local wireless company that services the brand. Wireless data service here costs $120 a month and has very limited capability. (Mind you that the average middle class Cambodian earns about $1o0-150 a month.)

So much for the branding of Phnom Penh. Sigh