Actually, I just searched on Google for “freshie boy” and they came up first.

I do have a sneaking suspicion that the author didn’t actually come to Phnom Penh, and just summarised the Lonely Planet’s entry on PP with a little more irrelevant colour. Phnom Penh has certainly changed over the last few years (and in a select few places headed upmarket), but poor people here are still just as poor.

As for the fashionably dressed local teens: they exist if badly pirated Mickey Mouse t-shirts and modded 75cc motorcycles are your idea of fashion. They’re referred to locally as “freshie boys” and “freshie girls”. There’s a bit about their fashion contests at http://www.nationalradio.com/tt_PPahJan06.shtml (which further down in the article also highlights that radio is now one of the sources of a nascent anti-Westerner sentiment (“some foreigners destroy any hope of building moral character in the country”)).

Now, it seems, PP is populated by mobile-phone toting fashionably dressed teens, clubgoers, Australians and Americans (and people speaking French, Korean, Japanese, and whatnot), and vendors. Tell me Phil, do any non-vending (and/or unfashionably dressed ie. barely-scraping-by) Cambodians live in PP anymore?

I’d love to see what the NYT does with Manila.

I actually thought that the Cambodia Daily would have shown a bit of restraint and not republished the NYT article. Even they can do better than that.