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How making shoes saved Phnom Penh's master cobbler I.C. Chaney's life and made him the darling of fashion lovers from around the world.
Foreigners crowding into I.C. Chaney's Beautiful Shoes shop on Street 143 revel in the prices of his handmade shoes - who could believe a custom-made leather sandal could cost just $15?
But Chaney's story of survival since he took over the family business in 1981 is even more remarkable
"My family has had a shoe business here for many years - through the Lon Nol period, and Sangkum Reastre Niyum. We had many famous customers like Kong Sam Oeun," Chaney says, referring to the great Khmer actor and male heart throb of the 1960's and 70's.
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Phnom Penh Will Be Short About 20 Megawatts Of Electricity During This Hot Season
Phnom Penh: When the hot season arrives, Phnom Penh and Takhmao [Kandal] are facing a lack of electricity, which is a heavy burden that has not yet been solved. It causes some areas in these two cities to have frequent power cut-offs, especially during the day, affecting the daily lives of the citizens.
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Friends-International Receives Internationally Recognized Award from the Skoll Foundation
Friends-International has just been presented with the prestigious Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship at a ceremony in Oxford. The award comes with a three-year, $1,015,000 funding grant which will allow Friends- International to strengthen and extend its services to provide direct quality services to at least 500,000 more street children by reinforcing and expanding its projects in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia and Honduras, as well as developing new projects in Vietnam, Yunnan (China), Malaysia, Mexico and countries in the Caribbean and Africa.
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Reflections of a Khmer Soul
This new work, by a Khmer American woman born in April 1975, just as her country was plunged into the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime, is not another first person narrative of the events of that time. Rather, it is a narrative of a personal journey exploring the legacy of being ethnic Cambodian in the aftermath of Pol Pot, of living with the stories of war that live as a "disorderly chaos churning in my head." Ms. Phim is not the daughter of urban elites banished to the countryside as "new" people, as all of those to publish first person accounts have been to date.
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Genuine Beijing dumplings go up market in downtown Phnom Penh
Although there is no sign in English, the telltale bamboo steamer baskets in the pristine kitchen front of house immediately alert dim sum fans to the delicious possibility of steamed dumplings, and in fact Beijing Ta Thang Khouv serves little else.
This new dumpling establishment owned by true Beijing expatriates and staffed by Cambodians has been open just a few weeks, but it already has a dedicated clientele of Chinese according to staff, although they also admitted these devotees were not yet arriving in droves, but rather dribs and drabs.
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Madonna, Britney, K-pop … and Pol Pot?
Sandwiched between the smiling faces of Cambodian music icons Sin Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea, the lithe body of US evergreen Madonna and reams of K-pop from South Korea, a darker music has returned to the shelves of many of the capital's prolific bootleg CD shops.
Khmer Rouge propaganda anthems are back in vogue, and according to vendors they are selling well as the 56-million dollar joint UN-Cambodian trial of former leaders of the Khmer Rouge's Democratic Kampuchea regime prepares to get underway.