Today I woke up feeling terribly colonial. I thought to myself: “Self, short of subjugating an entire people, what can you do to revel in this feeling of Western entitledness?”

“Aha,” I responded, “you can go to Raffles.”

Raffles, for those unitiated sorts whose homes aren’t guarded by men in gold-spiked pith helmets, is a gracious old hotel that has been one of the ex-pat centers in Phnom Penh since the French arrived in the mid-(whenever). As I walked up the pea-stone driveway and into this air condition valhalla, I felt—as all New Englanders do when approaching something dripping in affluence— an English accent rise in my throat.

Unfortunately, prices in Raffles do not reflect prices in Cambodia as a whole. Raffles sits, economically speaking, about a block from the Musee D’Orsay. I could only afford a small coffee and a pastry, which I ate by the pool in the company of the least bashful person in Kampuchea. Where Khmers go swimming in their jeans to avoid making a spectacle of themselves, this woman, whose body brought to mind the venus of willendorf after maybe three months of pilates, wore what can only be described accurately as a G-string. When she walked, her cheeks gave a little golf clap over the straining nylon.

In and of itself, this sight would have probably repulsed me, but the spectacle was made worthwhile by the four or five gardeners furtively doing anything in their power to get an eyeful. We are all voyeurs when we wander into other people’s world.

Anyway, the coffee was fabulous and I’m certain I will be back soon. Raffles has the bar, and I mean THE BAR—a giant room full of wicker chairs, sculpted elephants, pool tables and handles of Bombay sapphire. Heaven, essentially. I vowed to return as I stumbled back out in the 100 degree heat and waved for a moto, whose wheels shot gravel into my shins.