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madame cuc!, originally uploaded by maliayosh.
if you’re on a budget (and even if you’re not!) you MUST visit one of madame cuc’s hotels in the pham ngu lao area of ho chi min city (saigon) if you gt the chance. she is wonderful! this was definitely my favorite of all the places i’ve stayed in the past three months, and we’ve been allllll over the place, so i think i can be considered somewhat of an expert by now.
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some of you read the blog i wrote about cambodia and the khmer rouge and wanted to know more… its really sad that they don’t teach us much about it in school. i feel so ignorant, but i never really knew anything about it until coming here… over 2 million – some estimates say 3 million – of cambodia’s 7 million people were killed during the late 70’s when the khmer rouge party took over. they killed men, women, and children indiscriminately, but made specific targets of the educated – anyone who spoke foreign languages, anyone who wore glasses even, were automatically enemies of the new government. they were trying to create a marxist society of farmers and peasants (i still dont quite understand what they were hoping for)….
they made child soldiers out of many cambodian children and just basically forced the whole country to go through so many things that no one should ever have to go through… before the khmer rouge takeover, cambodians were facing a bloody civil war between the khmer rouge and the government, and even AFTER the khmer rouge was overthrown, they still were not brought to justice for the horrible crimes they committed. in fact, the US government and the UN included them in the new government that was installed after they were kicked out! so many cambodians lived in fear that it would happen again, for over twenty years! only in the past ten years or so has the khmer rouge been officially shut down. its absolutely nuts.
i know its sort of depressing, and it may seem irrelevant when our own country has so many problems of its own, but i just feel like its something that we should know about. especially since the US bombed so much of this region during those years and pretty much just covered the whole thing up. if nothing else, i feel like the story just needs to be told.
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pho in vietnam! yum!, originally uploaded by maliayosh.
... is in two countries in one day! =)
this year i woke up in cambodia and fell asleep in vietnam on my birthday, and i ... [Continue reading this entry] 
malia