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| From Christmas in Cambodia |
Nagaworld. It's the huge casino built at the far end of Sisowath. It's a real live casino hotel aspiring to Vegas, though I'm afraid to say that it's more in that slightly-off-the-strip-category. But for Cambodia, it's an edifice, a beast, and all the amenities are inside. There's a cigar bar with imported Cuban and Dominican varieties, which I've availed myself of more then once. There's five or six restaurants of the high end white tablecloth variety, featuring Western, Korean, Chinese, Thai, and good ol' Khmer cuisine. There are hundreds of luxury rooms with things like LCD televisions and rain showers, and there are lots of perky girls in tight outfits to serve you freeish beer while you're losing all your money on Blackjack.
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| From Christmas in Cambodia |
It's a huge investment project by one of the enormous firms that are just beginning to enter Cambodia. The clientele are mostly Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese. Khmers are theoretically not allowed to gamble, but there seems to be a lot of looking-the-other-way going on with that one. The company that owns it is incorporated in the Cayman Islands. You know, how one does.
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| From Christmas in Cambodia |
Nagaworld reminds me of home in a big way. I'm from Northern California and grew up in the West. My parents are not gamblers but we still spend a lot of time in casinos for one reason or another. I like the sound of them, the people watching, the completely ridiculous decor. And being from California, our casinos are also 89% Vietnamese and Chinese, with the corresponding shockingly good restaurants. I go into Nagaworld some times, walk around the gaming floor around the aggressively un-real painted blue sky, and think, "Ah, Lake Tahoe! Ah, Las Vegas, but slightly off the strip! Ah, Reno!" Then I remember where I am when I go back outside. It's almost poignant.
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| From Christmas in Cambodia |
Nagaworld completely went all-out for Christmas this year: I've never seen a gingerbread house of such sheer enormity. They have a stage with near constant live-christmas caroling going on, they have a "Christmas Pastry Wonderland," they have gigantic shiny gold deer bigger then a man, they have at least 200 Christmas trees, they have everything. I'm surprised no one slapped a Christmas hat on an apsara but I may not have been looking hard enough.
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