Phnom Penh

After taking in as many ancient Khmer ruins as we could handle, my mom and I caught a bus south to Phnom Penh, the modern capital of Cambodia.  The four-hour bus ride was surprisingly comfortable–except for “George of the Jungle” playing full-blast dubbed in Khmer (it’s just as annoying of a movie when in a language you can’t understand)–and offered an interesting glimpse at the countryside in central Cambodia.  Endless rice paddies, and villages made up of a couples of houses with a corner shop gathered around a junction, with intermittent rain showers slowing the motorbike traffic and the work in the fields.

Much of the countryside looks like this.

Phnom Penh is much a much grittier city than Bangkok, and much more hectic than Vientiane, but not intimidating or dangerous feeling as its reputation had me believe before arrival (I’ll save a more general comparison of the Southeast Asian capitals for a future post).  I felt as though I had to be constantly aware on the streets, but more so for the crowded, uneven sidewalks and closely passing motorbike traffic than any unusual lack of safety.  The city is fairly easy to navigate, as its laid out in a grid, so we explored almost entirely on foot.

Although we enjoyed some sights in the capital–the Independence Monument, the National Museum, the Royal Palace–it seemed like our most interesting sightseeing came just from walking around the city and taking in its quirks.  Whole roast pigs are on every street corner, and slowly become skeletons over the course of the day.  Absurd vehicles, like bicycles pushing bathtubs, cruise by.  Most of the colonial architecture is along the riverfront, where there is a pedestrian walkway and park abuzz with snack vendors and families in the evening.  (This is similar, I assume, to what Vientiane is trying to do with the riverfront area, much further upstream, but we’ll see).

A typical Phnom Penh street scene: motorbikes and roast pig.

The markets were a big source of entertainment, as we spent many hours perusing both the Central Market and the “Russian Market,” both labyrinths of home goods, fruits of all shapes (durians were in season, so their pungency seemed to permeate every produce aisle), all sorts of strange, edible creatures (dead, alive, and somewhere in between), and plenty of souvenirs.  Despite the fact that the US dollar seems to be the primary currency of use in Cambodia (at least in both Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, where foreigners are abundant), most things are much cheaper than in Laos, so the shopping–for ceramics, fabrics, jewelry–was irresistible.

It would be impossible to mention a visit to Phnom Penh without acknowledging the turmoil of Cambodia’s recent past and the scars it has left on the country.  The S-21 Khmer Rouge prison, a site of torture and genocide of thousands in the 1970s, now known as the Tuol Sleng Museum, is in a former high school, which is now, as then, in an unassuming residential area.  Walking around the city today, it’s difficult to imagine–as it always is during times of relative peace, I suppose–how radically different things were so incredibly recently.  Our taxi driver when we first landed in Siem Reap happened to bring up his childhood in the mere 15 minutes we spent in the car together.  He recounted, almost casually, being a young boy and being forced to do labor–no school, not enough food–then he trailed off to point out a sight downtown.

People as young as their mid-30s are be able to, and certainly would, remember the time of the Khmer Rouge, and even younger people will remember much more turbulent times than today.  Clearly it is something that has profoundly affected the national psyche, although as an outsider, visiting for such a short amount of time, it’s hard to describe how.  I felt a similar struggle in trying to understand Phnom Penh as a city: it isn’t charming, but it isn’t unattractive, not insanely chaotic, but certainly far from placid.  Perhaps it’s a place that you have to live in to be able to completely appreciate, which is how I generally feel about Vientiane.  But for me, characterizing the city, much like understanding how history continues to affect the people’s daily lives, remains an enigma.

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Central market.
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Chickens at the market.
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Peeled frogs at the market.
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Durians are in season.
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The Independence Monument.
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Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
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Barbed wire at S21, the former Khmer Rouge prison.
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A typical Phnom Penh street scene: motorbikes and roast pig.

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