Phenom Penh

We arrived in Phenom Penh yesterday and a friendly tuk tuk driver took us to hotel he recommended. We were pleased so I bartered with him to come back today and be our driver. We agreed on $15 for the day.

Sam picked us up from our hotel and drove us to the killing fields. This is a place where Cambodians killed Cambodians. Similar to the Nazis, a crazy dictator decided that Cambodia should only be a farming utopia. This meant that he blew up the central bank, shut down all institutions, and began systematically killing anyone who posed a threat to this plan. This includes anyone with education, who wore glasses (this means they're smart), and anyone who was not a rural farmer.

The prisoners were held and then taken to a field which used to be a Chinese cemetery. There, they were almost immediately killed by being bludgeoned since bullets were too expensive.

The most striking part of our visit was seeing bones and clothes from the mass graves coming to the surface...

From there, we visited the prison where people were held before being killed. It was an old high school. At this place we saw the cells, and all the mug shots of the victims. We found this to be a difficult experience. I was overcome with emotion after learning and touring these places; I was overwhelmed when we met a survivor.

Pol Pot was the name of the dictator, he killed over 3 million of his own people, and this only happened about 40 years ago...

After all that we needed a change of pace so we asked our tuk tuk driver to take us somewhere for lunch. We ate some delicious Khmer food (Khmer is the type of people who live in Cambodia) and had a few beers.

We toured the museum where we solidified our understanding of lingas and yonnis, aka God's (Shiva's) penis and vagina...

From there we toured the central market where I was propositioned several times to have a shave and a haircut. I found this hilarious.

We walked down a street that our Lonely Planet book recommended and found a nice place for dinner. As we were waiting for our food we spotted some Dutch friends we met the day before.

We are dinner together then drank beer and played cards until we were asked to leave. Oh ya, I also ordered a drink that was supposed to come in a bucket. Instead it came in the exact same bucket that is found next to every toilet in the country that is used to manually flush.... Shit!