Phnom Penh

My mom, Alice, and I arrived in Phnom Penh around 4:30 in the afternoon on December 13th. We found a hotel near the Mekong and wandered around. The city has some gorgeous architecture, but the first glimpses of city life were extremely depressing - tons of children begging on the street, and crippled people either from the war or the random mines that are still scattered throughout the country. The roads are insanely crowded and crossing any one of them involves risking your life multiple times. There are tons of bikes, motor and pedal, and tuk-tuks, and cars, and they all go in different directions. There are these crazy intersections with no streetlights or signs so you get this mess of cars in the middle, all trying to go a different way. It's rather frightening. A lot of the people on bikes wear blue face masks (the hospital kind) from the dirt and smog that all flies into your face as you drive. The buildings are mostly run down and you can definitely feel the poverty. We stopped into a store that sells handicrafts made by orphaned children and bought several really nice things. The money goes to the orphanage and the woman who worked there was incredibly kind - I have not met many people with the qualities that she seemed to have. I bought some lotus seeds for Alice and my mom to try, and then ended up giving them to a little girl on the street who got immensely excited to get the flowers. (They are lotuses that haven't bloomed yet, so you can take the seeds out of the bud and eat them...yum!) I also stopped at one of the many stalls that sells various fried critters - grasshoppers, worms, giant spiders, and some other unidentified crawly things - and actually got lucky and found a man nearby who spoke a bit of English and showed me how to eat them. The grasshopper was actually pretty good...crunchy! I liked it. I didn't quite make it to the massive spider. They're so popular here, something must be good about them! We also walked through a market that had fruits, vegetables, fish, and meat, and some other local things that I don't know what they are. It's so odd walking around and seeing children begging on the street and then watching a Lexus SUV drive by, or walking through the market where people are sitting on the ground selling eggs and then turning the corner and finding yourself on a touristy street with nice restaurants.

Our first day there, we went to the killing fields where there are buried about 17,000 people killed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. They are now privatized because some Japanese company gave the government an undisclosed sum and bought the rights to the fields and now charge admissions. Oh well for the people whose family members are buried there, as long as they can make money. The fields are outside of the city and getting to them involved a long and extremely bumpy tuk-tuk ride. At the fields, there is a giant stupa in the middle to commemorate those who died, and we gave a donation and lit some incense in their memory. There are 8000 skulls there that were recovered from the mass graves. Many of them are very damaged because bullets were too expensive to use most of the time. There is a tree where they hung the megaphone to drown out the cries. You just walk through it all and it's hard to fathom.

Then, after a break at the market where we did some shopping, we went to the Royal Palace. It is huge and ornate and covered in gold, silver, diamonds, emeralds, and everything else expensive and precious. There are several stupas and pagodas within the walls, and a pretty garden. The architecture is amazing, and quite a shocking contrast to the world outside the walls. We spent some time wandering there.

The next morning we went to see Wat Phnom, a big wat on a hill in the middle of the city. The story goes, that Lady Penh found two Buddha statues floating down the Mekong, and so built a shrine for them. There are tons of fat monkeys there so we bought some food and fed them, which was great fun, but also a bit odd considering all the starving people around.

Then we checkout out of our hotel and took the 6hr bus ride to Siem Reap, through gorgeous countryside, villages, people working in rice paddies...