Gurgling toilet
Our guesthouse had the most comfortable bed. I mean, maybe our standards have gone down the toilet but we’ve never slept so well. On the subject of toilets though, it sounds like our toilet has indigestion. It gurgles like it’s got an upset tummy on occasion, even if we’re nowhere near it. Aughh…Cambodia…
Anyway, we asked our guesthouse if there was a bakery nearby since this French guy we had met at the beach said next to France they were the best bakeries – well, coming from someone that should know – we had to try something. But we never found the bakery. The tuk-tuk driver from the previous day that had waited for us at the embassy so patiently rolled by and took us to this restaurant where we had a really good restaurant that we actually paid for the meal in Riels. Yummy.
After breakfast we headed to Toul Sieng Genocide Museum. I think we’re the only tourists that actually walk around here because the tuk-tuks are pretty cheap, but these feet were made for walking, not hanging out of a tuk-tuk. And it’s hot here, but not super-hot. Anyway, the museum. It was one of the most graphically disturbing museums I’ve ever been to. The Khmer Rouge in the 70’s converted a high school into a prison and “processed” over 17,000 prisoners through with only about a dozen surviving. And they kept incredibly detailed records. So they had pictures of the prisoners (which included little kids/infants). Then after they were tortured/killed they were transferred to the killing fields for mass burial. And they also used the kind of barbed wire where it doesn’t have the sticky things where you could commit suicide against. Nope, they wanted the prisoners alive so they could be tortured. Lovely.
After that we went to the Russian Market where you can buy anything your heart desires. We saw a guy carrying a motorbike in pieces (well, he had friends – it looked kind of heavy). Self-assembly required. Also, I saw Old Navy, Aeropostale clothes. Pretty funny.
After perusing the market we headed to Independence Monument (not much to it). Enroute, we met Natalie, a German, who was attempting to get a taxi to the National Museum but the drivers couldn’t understand where she wanted to go (which I don’t really get considering there are like 5 tourist attractions in the city) so she ended up walking with us since the monument was on the way to the National Museum. And after seeing the monument, stopping to get a croissant which was really good, we ended up tagging along to the National Museum. As far as museums go, it was pretty good. Cool building, cool statues, cool courtyard in the middle, it smelled really good because of the flowers that were being put in front of the statues of the buddha…kind of amazing what you can do with big rocks.
After that we grabbed some nachos and a beer (Natalie introduced us to beer and sprite – pretty yummy – apparently commonly done in Germany) and made plans to meet for dinner.
We decided we wanted to try street food. Which ended up being almost as expensive as restaurant food which doesn’t really make sense since all the other countries we’d been to had significantly cheaper street food. But we had this really good squid. Yum. After we headed to riverside for a drink, then back to Friends for margaritas and dessert – John was in heaven with Margarita lime meringue pie. After that we grabbed a tuk-tuk back to Natalie’s guesthouse with promises to meet up in Siem Reap in a few days and walked the 2 blocks to our guesthouse.
Tags: Cambodia, RTW Trip, siem reap
JohnCin
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