SIGHTSEEING IN/AROUND PNOHMPENH

Going through Thailand and Laos, while doing various activities we haven't done any museum sightseeing. Here we sort of caught up with it and visited two museums: the National Museum and Tuol Sleng Museum. The former one while very impressive, unfortunately, didn't entirey impressed us, because it is the kind of museum that only true "artsy" people would enjoy. The museum is filled with the sculptures and other artifacts from the Angkor Wat area. But it does have a very nice garden in the center with the ponds and lotuses and fish... After that we went to the Royal Palace, which is so overpriced in my opinion. The most of the Royal palace is closed to the tourists and what's open is basically a Throne Hall, which looks nice and that's it, and a Silver Pagoda. The silver pagoda interested me not because of its historical and cultural signifficance, but because it had a life-size Golden Budda encrusted with about 9 thousands diamonds, the biggest of which is over 25 carats. So, now we can tell that we've been to the National Museum and the Royal Palace. But would I go there again? No. Not my piece of cake.

The Tuol Sleng Museum on the other hand was very good if you can say "good" about a place with so many sad and gruesome feelings attached to it. It is basically a high school, which at one point became a prison known as Security Prison-21 (S-21) during the Khmer Rouge. The S-21 soon became the largest center of detention and torture in the country. Walking through the halls of what should be a building filled with kids and their laughter, instead you get black and white photos of victims and their executions and tortures, the torture tools and cells and testaments of people who survived all this and also who worked at S-21 for Khmer Rouge. Again I don't have a card-reader on me now to post up pictures. I will try to do it soon. :)

After that we went to the Killing Fields museum, the place where thousands of victims from S-21 were brought and executed. The sheer atrocity and disrecpect for a human life is just astonishing. The killing fields museum has a memorial building filled with the sculls of people they exumed later on. The fact that it's been less than 20 years since Cambodians began living in peace is quite amazing as well. It's hard to believe that all people aged 40 and older remember and have lived and seen all the horible things that happened during the Pol Pot's regime.