Icecream Sandwich on Wheels
There is an icecream vendor that plies his wares somewhere near my house at about 5:00 am each morning. I know this because he deploys the most common tactic to sell icecream in Phnom Penh: playing a garish electronic ringtone version of the Lambada. The process by which the Forbidden Dance came to be associated with mobile Cambodian icecream vendors is another story, a story that the pictured icecream vendor, Cheourn, couldn’t begin to answer because he uses the less sexy method of ringing a handheld bell to attract customers. Since Hun Sen placed the kibosh on broadcasting sexiness late last year, Cheourn’s more conservative approach is justified.
The icecream itself is made primarily from sweetened condensed milk and the block of cake surrounding it is carved from the same sort of rubbery foam from which they used to make Muppets, until the puppeteers began contracting a new form of hand cancer. Next time I’ll have a go at the sweet bread roll instead.
February 21st, 2006 at 2:31 pm
The sweet bread roll is not a lot better !
This is one area where I bow to the import market – Ben and Jerry’s or Haagen-Dazs curtacy of Lucky Market.
Playboy
February 21st, 2006 at 3:54 pm
I’ve had numbers like this in Nha Trang and Saigon. Bread and ice-cream equals chalk and cheese.
Give me a cone any day!
Liking your blog a lot! Finally had a gander just now.
February 21st, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Cheers. I’m a pretty big fan of Stickyrice myself - I’ll have to add it to my currently anemic list of blogs.
On the icecream front, I’ve also seen a few carts serving waffles instead of cake/bread in the past month which is an interesting development. I’ll have to keep track of it.
February 23rd, 2006 at 7:45 am
The Thai version of that ice cream is made from coconut; the Khmer is not the same? The bread in Thailand is a real bread roll, making it a real ice cream sandwich!
June 8th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
[…] Previously: Icecream Sandwich on Wheels […]
February 26th, 2007 at 9:13 am
[…] Ice cream in the tropics is pornographic. There is a moral wrongness about consummating your lather of hot season sweat with something cold and creamy. It’s a fleeting pleasure riddled with First World guilt. What’s more it’s for sale, quite openly, on the streets of Phnom Penh. Presumably, ice cream arrived in Phnom Penh with the French colonisers and has since become popular with the colonised as a street food (which I have covered previously in both a microbiological and more sociological sense). What has changed within the past year is the opening of a handful of upmarket establishments, pimping their rich flavours to richer Phnom Penhois. […]
June 14th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
[…] So says Mercutio, regarding the “Egg Man” debate currently raging in The Cambodia Daily letters page. For those of you playing at home, Phnom Penh’s aural landscape is punctuated by motorcyclists with a cartful of eggs and a loudspeaker that intones the looped words “PORNG MOAN AING PSOUM KROUENG PISEH” (Barbecued eggs with special sauce!). He’s up there with my favorite street vendor sounds: not as good as the Lambada-obsessed icecream vendor but more entertaining that the bread delivery guy who yells “nuuuuuum pan” (Breeeead!). […]