Beer and Gambling

After the rather limited selection of beer brands in Laos (Beer Lao) there is much more competition going on in Cambodia.

The beer billboards are everywhere, sometimes one after the other advertising the same brand over and over. 

When we were in Banlung they were having a little festival/fair with the usual stalls (food, clothing & accessories) but also matress vendors, stalls with all kind of plastic containers (funny side note, many shops use plastic buckets to hold the worthless bundles of notes 🤣) but also snake oil vendors trying to sell all kind of tinctures and ointments.

Buckets of cash

Anyway, the main sponsor of the whole event was GANZ BERG, German Premium Beer 🍺 

An not too subtle 🤣

GANZ BERG!!

Besides non stop advertisements on the main screen for beer there was also a spot running for Freshy, some kind of fruit juice 🤷‍♂️ Using great slogans as „More Healthy“, „More Travel“ and „More Beautiful“ 😂 and showing a western girl with white skin and blue eyes 🤦‍♂️

But many people can’t read the western letters anyway as we realized trying to find a TukTuk back to our Hotel 😆

Singing must not have been high up on the job requirement 😅

Almost bought a shirt

Healthy food 😇

Besides Ganz Berg there is Cambodia, Krud, Hanuman and many more all competing for the thirsty Cambodians. And what better to draw attention than some prize game. Almost every brand we drank so far had some form of lottery going on where you could win more beer, motor bikes, pickups or cash. 

When you win a „free“ beer you still have to pay 1k Riel (full price is 2.5k to 3k Riel, 4k Riel is 1$) so ensuring you keep on drinking the same brand 😉 

One evening we started with two „free“ beer tokens and kept on „winning“ which cost us in the end 2$ for 8 beer 🤪

Besides the obvious down side of combining gambling and alcohol there is also the fact that they use these old style pull tabs which all end on the floor… 😕