Phnom Penh is quite a city of contrasts. Crumbling 1920's French mansions, Vietnameese, Chineese and Thai shopkeepers selling spices and mobile phones, beautiful temples with orange, red and yellow-robed monks strolling with umbrellas in the sun, NY baseball caps on mototaxi drivers every two steps you take asking "Killing fields today? Genocide museum? Shooting range, you wanna shoot AK?"
Baguette stands dot the riverside, and mine victims hold their hats for change, NGO-owned Land Rovers ride alongside rickshaws down back streets where you can have your shoes repaired or your fortune told.

It's strange here, but much more a real city than Siem Reap, which gave the impression of just being thrown together to provide temple-tourists with a place to sleep and get pissed and sidewalks for the locals to sleep on.

So, we've spent a few days here, mostly walking around, getting ourselves lost and finding some good restaurants along the way. I think we may have found the hotel from 'City of Ghosts'. We also found out that the mischevious monkey in the movie was not an exaggeration; we've caught a few on our balcony (one seemed very confused when he peeped on me in the shower, 'where's the fur!?') and later a momma monkey came by to investigate after I gave her baby a cookie.

On a grim note, anyone who comes to Cambodia really owes it to themselves (if they have any interest in history or human behavior) to visit the markers of the atrocities comitted here under Pol Pot's regime in the 1970's. Namely, the Genoside Museum and the Killing Fields. The Toul Sleng (literally: guilty hill) is a series of school buildings that were used as an imprisonment and torture camp and is now a museum and a memorial to the thousands of people who lived (and died, with only 7 people surviving) there. It's been said that what is the most striking about the 'museum' is how ordinary it looks, and I agree. It's obvious that it must have been a huge effort to sterilize what must have been festering when it was found. Now, no smell at all remains.
There are paintings done by one of the survivors displaying how the sparse playground equipment was used for interrogation, the conditions in the cells where the prisoners were kept and other aspects of life there

It's hard to look at the multitude of photos taken by the authorities of each of the prisoners, they fill several rooms. Here's a few more photos....

Then we went to the Killing Fields, where Khmer Rouge soldiers systematically shot and bludgened prisoners to death, to then be left in mass graves. I didn't take any pictures there, you can look at J.P.'s site for a few. It was a somber field with trees and irrigation ditches, without the markings, it would have been hard to tell what had happened there.

Here's some more photos from around town.....

Just a comment on the beggar situation: this morning as we were trying to eat breakfast by the river, an insane beggar woman with two small kids was hitting, pinching and pulling their hair in an attempt to make them cry (a success) and thereby getting money from tourists. A woman actually gave her something after this display, I was shocked! I tried to explain to a security guard what this disturbed person was doing to her children, but apparently there isn't a Cambodian child welfare organization to take these kids away.

There are so many poor and dirty kids running around, but at least most of them seem to have friends and family, you see them playing in the park, running around, laughing, it makes one wonder why someone has to be beaten in addition to being poor and filthy and being made to beg. Looking at these scenes everyday, I can understand why Hindus and Buddhists came up with the idea of Karma, it certainly makes it more digestable to believe that these misfortunate people are in their situation because they somehow deserve it.

Thanks, I just had to get that out, it's been building for a while.

Tomorrow, we're off to Sihanoukville, the closest Cambodia has to a beach resort- looking forward to my dose of rays.....