Gracie is the Best OK ♥: Introduction to Phnom Penh

We arrive at the port in Phnom Penh and I seriously get the biggest culture shock of my life.
Vietnam was just traffic and people... but Phnom Penh was dusty, disgusting... and poverty-sticken.

WOW.

We take a tuk-tuk to our hotel. Little do I know... the tuk-tuk is soon to become our sole mode of transport for the next 9 or so days in Cambodia. Welcome to Phnom Penh!

Phew! At least the husband does good by me with the shelter...

We visit the Royal Palace and its all sorta *yawn* and the same sorta stuff you see in Bangkok:

You are not allowed to wear singlets so I had my cashmere jumper on and I was DYING of heat exhausion. Froggie thought it would be a good idea if I just walked around like this:

The markets here were equally OMG... I couldn't believe what a big difference it was from Vietnam. Pretty much the whole thing looked like this:

Anyway, we still couldnt help ourselves from buying some silk scarfs and a very.... ahem.... "manly" singlet for the husband. Look at him with his well-rehearsed manly pose! AHAHAHA

This is terrible. At a Lonely Planet approved restaurant and very fancy by Cambodian standards, we come across a SLUG in the soup. REPULSE! DISGUST! And this is after we had almost finished the entire thing... ewwwww

Needless to say, I had a stomach bug that day and was on the toilet all night. But I dont think it actually came from the bug cos I had it in the morning. I believe it must have been from the 30 or so oysters I ate the night before in Chau Doc (that came from the dirty Mekong River). Husband was fine cos he didnt eat any oysters but I was dying from multiple heart palpitations from all the dehydration...

Sadness.

But, being the SOLDIER that I am, I decided that I was completely recovered the next morning and set off to see the torture chambers and the killing fields. Nice.

The Killing Fields of Cheong Ek

During the Pol Pot regime, the Khmer Rouge killed almost a third of it's own population. FOR NOTHING. This dude really took the idea of totalitarian communism to the extreme and made a hyper-Maoist idea turn into a bloodbath of educated and common civilians.

There is a glass memorial that houses the skulls of only some of the victims of this merciless and pointless killing, but it is full and stacked up to the sky.

We payed our respects out the front:

Each layer has a collection of skulls labelled with the ages of the victims. These are the 15-20 year olds:

A pile of the victims clothes are left at the bottom of the memorial in the same state as they were when they were removed by the soldiers. The women raped and the others all stripped naked before being executed.

Some signs that explain more about what happened to the people at the Killing Fields:

A fraction of the mass graves. This place was HUGE and extended way beyond what they allow tourists to see. Sad sad sad... we were quiet the whole time...

These kids wanted a picture with me, and then immediately after started begging for money. Beggars are so commom in Phnom Pehn, they just camp outside nice restaurants and outside hotels and they look so terrible and dirty. Its really really sad but I was in culture-shock mode the entire time. I've seen poverty before in China and in the countryside in Vietnam but this was bang smack in front of my doorstep every morning and everywhere. Sadness is not even a word...

The serenity of the fields now is no indication for what happened here only 30 or so years ago. There were so many beautiful butterflies everywhere we wondered if they were the souls of the people who died here...

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museam

This used to be a high school. Pol Pot transformed it into a torture chamber and a detention centre for his victims. We found out here that the Khmer Rouge soldiers were only aged between 12-20 years old. They were kids that he brainwashed and "re-educated", kids that were scared to lose their own lives (the Khmer Rouge killed many of their own soldiers) and had no other choice but to obey rules to kill and torture others.

This is not a "museam" like the War Museam in Vietnam. This is the real thing that is slowly being restored to turn into more of an educational landmark. But real people were tortured here, lived here and died here *shivers*.

Below are the school grounds with the graves of 14 people who were tortured in individual classrooms and died there. All other prisoners were taken to the Killing Fields for immediate execution:

The individual classroom/torture chambers:

The Prison Rules:

Faces of the many people who were housed here. There are rooms and rooms of these pictures. One Cambodian visitor actually found a picture of her missing brother in one of the photos. OMG you would have DIED...

Pictures of the people being tortured. Every single victim was photographed once when they enter the prison, and again when they died. Everything was documented meticulously for Pol Pot for himself to review. Perverted.

The people were chained to their arms and feet and weren't allowed to move. If they wanted to even move an inch or scratch from the many bugs that bit them, they had to ask permission otherwise they were beaten:

Brick cells built into the classrooms to hold multiple prisoners:

Wooden cells:

EXHAUSION!

After that, we had to have some rooftop cocktails at our hotel to numb some of that horror. BOO and DOWN WITH THE KHMER ROUGE!!

That's pretty much all there is to do in the capital city of Cambodia. It is really just a pit stop on the way to Siem Reap.

At the airport, this sign was so funny. So I'm allowed to bring bullets and machine guns in my checked luggage huh?