GavinMac Category: Commentary Lately, there have been a lot of Westerners moving to Cambodia or making plans to move to Cambodia. Some of the recent interest in Cambodia has come from Westerners living in Thailand. Rising prices in Thailand and stricter Thai visa regulations have already contributed to a noticeable influx of shifty-eyed, tattooed sexpats creeping across the border into Cambodia.
There has been such an overwhelming interest in moving to Cambodia that two recent books have been published on the topic. I personally believe that there are significant drawbacks to moving to Cambodia that could probably fill an entire book. Maybe not a real book, but definitely one of those silly e-books. Unlike Ms. Goldberg and Ms.
You will die younger in Cambodia. This is a big one. The average life expectancy for Westerners living in Western countries is about 75 to 80 years old, depending on the country. Unofficially, the average life expectancy for Western expatriates living in Cambodia is There are a number of reasons why moving to Cambodia will shave about twenty years off your life. Cambodia has a lot of common diseases that you would never catch in your home country, like Typhoid, Dengue Fever, Hepatitis, and Malaria.
The medical care in Cambodia is atrociously bad. The ambulances are unreliable; the doctors are unqualified; the hospitals are unsanitary. Even easily treatable illnesses can quickly become life-threatening if Cambodian doctors get involved. Sometimes expats in Cambodia succumb not to illness, but to traffic accidents or other hazards. Expats like to ride motorbikes, often helmetless, presumably because they think it makes them look cool.
This can be rather dangerous in a country with reckless local drivers, no enforcement of traffic laws, and poor emergency medical care. If you start choking in a restaurant in a Western country, your waiter or another customer will quickly perform the Heimlich Maneuver on you. If you start choking in a restaurant in Cambodia, the locals will all stand around dumbfounded and stare at you until you turn blue and collapse on the floor.
Only then will one of them spring into action and attempt to revive you by vigorously rubbing tiger balm on your forehead. Cambodia is a horrible place to raise a child. If you have a child or you are planning to have children, you definitely should not move to Cambodia. World Health Organization statistics show that a child born in Cambodia is ten times more likely to die before the age of 5 than a child born in France. All of the diseases that kill adults in Cambodia are even more dangerous to young children.
Kids are also more likely to be involved in accidents requiring emergency medical care, because kids are fragile and kind of stupid. While children may be coddled and overprotected in Western societies, they are simply left to their Darwinian fate in Cambodia. Cambodian children are often seen wandering the streets without adult supervision or perched helmetless on the front of passing motorbikes.
Nobody really cared. If your daughter develops acute appendicitis in your home country, you can take her to the emergency room at a modern hospital. If your daughter develops acute appendicitis in Cambodia. Just start over with a new kid. Their future will still be quite bleak. The educational system in Cambodia is absolutely dire, from the primary schools through the universities.
As young Western citizens, your children enjoy the same wonderful opportunity that you had to grow up in a civilized country with good schools, quality health care, free speech, seat belts, career prospects, democracy, Fig Newtons, and long life expectancies. Your choice. What amazes me is that the Westerners who decide to raise their children in Cambodia remain in total denial about what terrible, selfish parents they really are.
Cambodia Parent Network? Good grief. The infrastructure sucks. Even compared to neighboring countries like Vietnam and Thailand, the infrastructure in Cambodia is truly appalling. The schools, hospitals, roads, and utilities are all of very poor quality. Trash piles up in the street. Rats and roaches abound. Main roads in the capital city are now gridlocked during rush hours, and traffic only gets worse each year. There is no mass transit system and nowhere to park your car. Sidewalks are impassable.
Internet connections are relatively slow. The tap water is dodgy. There are no zoning laws and no effective law enforcement. The noise pollution from karaoke parlors at 2 a. Many expats report regular power outages in their neighborhoods, sometimes lasting hours a day. That will put a major damper on your online porn habit. Just walking outside between the hours of 8 a. Oh, and Cambodia smells really bad.
Not just the Walkabout. Living in Cambodia will destroy your financial future. Let us agree that the hallmark of a successful life is living as long as possible while simultaneously acquiring as many material possessions as you can. Like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, but with a hot young wife too.
Near Russian Market, of course. So just plan on working in a low paid teaching job in Cambodia until the day you die. Keep in mind that your kids will already be well behind the financial eight ball because you raised them in an impoverished country with an inadequate school system and few legitimate career opportunities.
The job market is extremely competitive these days in most Western countries. Your mother will be so disappointed. But deep down, she will be crushed that you are moving so far away from her. You have a moral obligation to help take care of your mother in her later years.
She may justifiably respond to this affront by cutting you out of her will. Cambodia has long been a haven for fugitives and fuck ups, deadbeats and deathpats. And those are just the St. There are a lot of Western bar owners in Cambodia, because there are a lot of Western bars in Cambodia. Excessive drinking is by far the most popular pastime among Western expatriates.
Because Cambodia only attracts certain types of expats, you will end up making friends in bars with the kind of undesirable people that you would never associate with back home. Even though you have little in common with these people, you will become friends out of necessity, because you need someone to drink with and they need someone to drink with.
You will end up spending a lot of time with them, but you will never be able to trust them like your real friends back home. In fact, your new drinking buddies in Cambodia will never even bother to learn your last name. If you start routinely binge drinking in your home country, your true friends back home will express concern for your well-being and try to stop you from destroying your life.
Your expat friends in Cambodia will hand you another beer and try to introduce you to their meth dealer. Your Thai girlfriend will absolutely hate it.
During the last few months, several new posters have actually joined the Khmer discussion forums to ask about getting visas for their Thai wives and girlfriends to move to Cambodia also. We all know that opportunistic young Thai women have been marrying or shacking up with older Western men for decades.
In exchange, the Western man moves the Thai woman to a proper Western country, or he builds her an oversized house in her home province that is the envy of all her slutty, gold-digging friends. Then she waits comfortably for him to die. Moving a Thai woman to Cambodia does not improve her standard of living. It will seem to her like a cruel joke, not unlike bailing a black friend out of jail and then driving him straight to a Ku Klux Klan rally.
You need to understand that all Thais look down on Cambodians, in the strange way that the poor bastards who live in Cleveland still look down on those losers from Detroit. Even the most open-minded Thai girlfriend is probably going to ask some skeptical questions about moving to Cambodia. There is a better solution. Do the noble thing that troubled expats in Thailand have been doing for years — break up with your girlfriend and then leap to your death from the balcony of your Pattaya condo.
Gavinmac is a regular contributor to Khmer who is considering moving to Cambodia in early
The plan entails three steps: There are a lot of Western bar owners in Cambodia, because there are a lot of Western bars in Cambodia. Then she waits comfortably for him to die. Il proiettile colpi' la mano di Biswood, facendogli volare la pistola. Previously, water from the canal had Dating in whk city westward into the Buttermilk Channel, but now water from the channel went into the Gowanus Canal. The organisms they found included typhoidcholeradysenteryDating in whk city, and tuberculosis. At the same time, the music communicates frustration and a constant longing to escape. Near Russian Market, of course.
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