Phnom Penh

Oh god. Where do I start?

Well, I guess I can start by saying that there's a gecko on the ceiling of this internet... place (not really a cafe, as there's no food or drink, just wicker partitioned computers) in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and that it is a balmy 78 degrees or so out by the river. How do geckos stay attached to ceilings? Hm.

Oh, and the price for 60 minutes of internet use is is 1500 riel, or $0.375.

Okay, still don't know where to start. Huh. Well, we arrived yesterday from Bangkok, where we bid our 4-star hotel a sad farewell, and managed to call the Riverside Hotel, one of the hotels recommended by Lonely Planet. As we waited for the hotel shuttle to pick us up, we sat on the curb of the tiny airport and gazed at the parking lot and the palm trees and the big sign in the distance that read "Welcome to Cambodia" and we thought, "Oh yeah. This is gonna be good."

This feeling held throughout our ride to the hotel and through our getting settled in our room, which at $35 a night is pretty pricey for Phnom Penh (in comparison, we have TWO rooms, one with AC and one with a river view, at a guest house tonight that together cost $12). I opened the window and was greeted by a mild breeze off the river and the sound of scooters zipping by. (According to a hotel staffer, 70 percent of Cambodians have scooters, but I couldn't tell if that was 70 percent of all Cambodians or 70 percent of all Cambodians who have motor vehicles.)

Scooters, or motos, are the preferred mode of transport here -- no public bus system and few taxis around. It's not uncommon to see a family of 4 all on one moto, and once in a while, a family of 5 or 6. Not to mention passengers carrying shopping bags, bicycles, windows, and wicker chairs.

We headed out of the hotel to see Wat Phnom, the place for which Phnom Penh was named. Legend has it that a Madame Phnom found four statues of Buddha at this hill ("penh"), and thus Phnom Penh was founded. At the temple, there is statue of Buddha in the main building, and a smaller shrine to Madame Phnom in the back.

The wat was cool, but cooler yet was when we walked out of the temple and spotted monkeys in the trees surrounding the building. Very cute. "They steal things, you know," Wendy said, and I took a tighter grip on my camera as I snapped away. As I was focusing on one, a sudden movement to the right caught my eye, and what to my wondering eye did appear but a monkey that had just caught a bird and was killing it. And then chowing down on it.

Monkeys. Very cute. Very scary.

There were several people walking around with cages filled with birds, and I thought they were merely selling them until Wendy pointed out someone who had just bought two birds. The young man held them in his hands while his friend ran inside the temple to get a cup of holy (?) water (a bucket of water with lotus petals floating in it was available). His friend sprinkled the birds with the water from the cup, and he then let the birds free. They flew to a nearby treetop. Apparently, they come back to the cage, where they are sold, released, and come back again.

We also saw an elephant near the temple, whom we could have fed a banana to, but refrained. Instead, we just watched as another foreigner fed it the banana. And wondered if the elephant didn't sometimes get sick of bananas.

After Wat Phnom, we headed down to the Central Market, which radiates out from an enormous four-wing open building. The vendors inside the building were shutting down for the day, but those outside were going strong. Orchids, silks, fried spiders (yum!) (just kidding. didn't have the stomach to try 'em), clothes -- yup, all that, plus the other 99 percent of things that I can't remember.

While I was taking pictures of the fried spiders, beetles and grasshoppers, a monk in orange robes and glasses came up to Wendy and said hello. "Where are you from?" he asked. America, Wendy replied. He asked her a few more questions before saying, "I'm sorry, I'm busy, I must go now," and striding off into the stalls of the market.

You all know I'm not much of a buyer of things. (In fact, just today, at a shop where the proceeds go to help poor Cambodians, I was about to leave without buying anything when Wendy said, "It's beautiful, it's well-made, it's for a good cause, and it's cheap. We're not leaving til you buy something." I ended up buying a gorgeous silk purse that I now adore. Thanks, Wendy!) So even though I enjoy markets, I think of shopping as a sightseeing activity (even at home!). Here, it's a spectator sport, one that I am no good at playing and am more than content to let Wendy do. Because we're westerners, we get quoted a different price than the locals, usually 10 times the price or so. Which doesn't bother us, given that we've got 10 times the income that locals do. But getting quoted one price, getting shorted on the change, and being lied to when we challenge it is, well, something else.

Today, for example, we bought teeny tiny bananas (like, bananettes) and the vendor quoted us a price of 1,000 riel (about a quarter). I didn't have enough in riel, so I gave her a dollar, and she gave me back the change in riel (the dollar and riel are both accepted here). Only the change amounted to 3,900 riel, and we should have gotten back 4,000. When we asked about the remaining 100 riel, she pulled out a calculator and punched in "3,900." Um, no. Wendy managed to find 1,000 riel, so we asked for the dollar back and gave the vender the riel instead.

That kind of thing was a shock yesterday. It's only natural to the locals that we should look like large, human-shaped ATMs, but the feeling that everyone is out to get me is, well, not pleasant.

But that was nothing compared to the man I bought two books from. See, at the Bangkok airport, I started reading a book called First They Killed My Father, an account of the author's experiences as a child during the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, wanted to turn Cambodia into an agrarian worker's paradise. They did this by imprisoning, torturing, and killing teachers, monks, intellectuals, anyone who wore glasses or spoke a foreign language, and their families. Today we saw Tuol Sleng, or S-21, the high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison and torture camp. We also saw the Killing Fields, where 17,000 men, women and children who were imprisoned at S-21 were bludgeoned to death. Nearly 9,000 skulls (all that have been exhumed -- I overheard a guide say that the rest will remain buried; in Buddhist belief, if the head is disturbed, the spirit cannot be at rest.) are encased in a tall shrine in the fields, which are, in that curious twist of fate that sometimes accompanies these things, bucolic and beautiful.

Because of the long years in which the Khmer Rouge was waging war against the Vietnamese and other enemies (can you tell I don't have my copy of the Lonely Planet in front of me? thought so), the countryside is littered with land mines. Lonely Planet is very clear about always, always staying on the path, even if you need to answer the call of nature. Better to be caught in a compromising position than to find a land mine by the method most are found -- some person or animal steps on it.


So. At the market, I was about to pass by a man selling books, when he held out a copy of First They Killed My Father, which was $20 in the Bangkok airport. He was selling it for $3. I saw another book about S-21 that looked interesting, and while I was looking through that, a group of street urchins came up and began to pester Wendy for money. When I offered the man $5 for both books, rather than $6, one of the street kids mutely pointed to the man's left foot. It was made out of wood. I paid the $6.

After that, though, the kid wouldn't leave us alone. He followed us around the market, repeating the few English words he knew: "Sir, hungry, money, what's your name, see you tomorrow." He was dirty, barefoot and persistent, and a combination of guilt, annoyance and sadness welled up. I finally walked over to the plant section and studied the orchids, which sell for so much in the States, and ignored his pulls at my elbow and his pleas for money and food long enough that he said, "Okay, see you tomorrow," and left.

After that, I felt shell-shocked. I knew about the poverty in Cambodia before I came here, but I don't think anything I could have read or heard or seen could have alleviated the shock. We went back to the hotel, and I lay on the bed and cried quietly. The dust, the dirt, the vendors, the beggars, the missing limbs -- it was just too much. I thought about how I'd looked out the window a few hours earlier and felt so happy about the warm weather and the palm trees.

I managed to get my feelings under control a bit after writing everything down in my journal, and today, things were much better. In fact, they were great, and I am very much enjoying seeing new things and learning about Cambodia. The sense of guilt and sadness is still there, but locked away where it can't overwhelm me as it did yesterday.

Oh, there's so much more to tell, and just not enough time to do it. Going to a restaurant last night and not having a ride back to the hotel, going between the Lonely Planet's phrasebook and gestures for 10 minutes to ask for a taxi or a phone, winding up on the backs of two motos after someone who knew English finally stopped laughing in the back of the room and came up to help us out. Today, blowing a tire on the way to the Killing Fields, showing local kids their pictures on my digital camera, and -- again -- getting rides from two motos. The cows in the fields and the shacks by the dirt road, and the children playing and begging around the mass graves. The horrific images and memories at Tuol Sleng. The diamond eyes and 8,000 other diamonds on the Diamond Buddha in the Silver Pagoda, located on the Royal Palace grounds. Eating a burger with a heart-shaped fried egg at Mondo Burger. I wish I could treat all these memories with as much time as I have devoted to describing just the first few hours here. But I didn't come to Cambodia to aggravate my carpel tunnel, so I'll stop here.

There are some Christmas lights around, and some really annoying tinny Christmas jingles were coming out of a fake Christmas tree at Mondo Burger, but Cambodia is still mostly Buddhist, and tomorrow is not a holiday here. Still, I know that in some parts of the world, children from one to 92 are lying awake, listening for the jingle of sleigh bells and -- phtooie! Ew, where did that dreck come from? Sorry about that.

Merry Christmas, from Cambodia.