A Day in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We spent the day walking around PP. It started at a Parisian type café with a very expensive breakfast ($11!). Then we went to several airlines to book our flight to Luang Prabang, Laos. We will leave on the 20th and stay there about a week. We plan to be in Tanzania from ~3 to the ~10th of December and then be in Leuven, Belgium on the 11th.

We visited the Tuol Sleng genocide memorial in the afternoon. Quite depressing. Of the 20,000 that went through only 7 lived. The Khmer Rouge had about 50 such sites and killed off about 2 million of their own between 1976 and 1978. It only stopped after the Vietnamese invaded (a move the U.S. opposed at the time). Pol Pot was one of all the revolutionaries that gave a bad name to Marxism.

We had dinner last night with friends of Kris’ who live here and work for NGOs. They live well with a driver, security guard, cook, and a nanny all in an expansive house surrounded by two layers of barbed wire on top of an 8 foot wall. We learned that about half of the GDP here comes from foreign aid and that the average salary in the garment industry is about $1.75 per day.

Today we check into a new guest house, then walk around PP and possibly go to the Foreign Correspondents Club for happy hour.

I have been practicing my Khmer. Aw Koon means thank you. It is difficult to learn much because there are about 26 vowels. A slight change can dramatically change the meaning. To say “ I don’t understand” you could say kh’nyohm muhnyuht te. However, because of my ignorance of inflection, when I said it, it was heard as “My hovercraft is full of eels”.

The traffic here is typical of a frontier town. Stop signs are non-existent. We did see one stop light, but it was having a limited audience. A red light has little meaning. When we cross, we walk deliberately at a fixed pace so the drivers can anticipate our motion. Mopeds are everywhere and there’s never a break in traffic so this city is a pedestrian’s nightmare.

On the way to the boat from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh on Monday, our bus hit a boy on a bicycle. We are convinced that if we tourists did not yell for the bus driver to stop and make sure the boy was okay, the driver would have just kept going. The official advice to foreigners who hit someone or who get in an accident is to just keep driving to avoid getting beat up by a mob. So yes, we are having a stereotypical honeymoon experience!

As an indication of the decline of the economy here, moped sales are down 70%