How to Drink Coffee (Cambodia Edition)

I was prepared for a return to a tea-based life in Cambodia. Pakistanis, Indians, Chinese...all the places I know in Asia drink tea. With the exception of Ethiopia and the USA, the entire world I know drinks tea. Tea stirs up thoughts of fuzzy nighttime routines, formal high tea with biscuits, African women heaping sugar into chai, and old Pakistani men staring on street corners. This is tea as I know it. It can be a beautiful thing. But on some days I self-identify as a quasi-American from New York. The Americans I know from New York drink coffee. I don't know many Americans from New York...but that's not the point.

I was not grieved to learn that I can drink lots of coffee in Phnom Penh. Phnom Penh is Southeast Asia's NGO Mecca because visas are so easily obtained. The capital city's economy caters to this massive foreign population clustered across the city from every Western destination known to mankind. Foreign influence aside, even Cambodians drink iced coffee. Coffee is rarely if ever served hot. It's also fixed with sweetened condensed milk making it ridiculously sweet, so you ask for "fresh milk" for a less milkshake-tasting morning beverage.

I've found iced coffee on literally every corner at any type of local restaurant, such as the place down from my office where I try not to watch how the dishes are washed. I learned the straws are rewashed so I haven't been back. I've yet to learn how it's brewed because the normal implements are nonexistent, God-forbid it's boiled, yet this might be true. It's not exactly good coffee but it's on ice with lots of sugar.

I've learned if I walk 20 minutes to the Russian Market, there are an abundance of the foreigner (or brongs in slang Khmer) frequented coffee shops. There I can pay more, but it will be hygienically appealing and I will be consuming my cappuccino or iced mocha with other brongs in an air-conditioned environment. I can even pretend I'm in France, or Zimbabwe, or Pakistan....or any other foreign hang-out I grew up in. Everyone else looks just like you so you don't feel foreign.

Or, I can buy the canned Nescafe iced coffees which aren't either bad or expensive. Vietnam produces quite a few decent canned ice coffee mixtures, one of the larger coffee producers in the Southeast Asia region, some of which are not entirely bad. They'll shoot you up with caffeine and sugar just like a red bull, very unglamorous. Cambodians say that Laotian coffee is the best, because everything negative is associated with Vietnam.

I've learned that coffee at the grocery store is mostly instant which inspires many strong negative feelings which I often express vocally with great passion.  I may never drink hot coffee in Cambodia, which makes it easier to run down to the sketchy local coffee shop then ever brew it myself which just might happen.

Thinking of coffee and tea overseas constantly reminds me of a dear friend my family knew from years ago...."in 50 years, you're going to have Pepsi declared the national drink. You'll have folk songs written about drinking Pepsi and there will be books with titles like, 'Three Cups of Pepsi.'" Noah's not entirely wrong. That could happen for Cambodia. Globalized beverage preferences are hardly new...the quest for tea took Europeans East...and now Asians go West for coffee...and Justin Bieber.