phnom penh,cambodia

susan and i have made it to cambodia and i have to say that getting here was an experience in itself. the bus was ok to the border, but the border was just as i imagined. hot and chaotic and dusty. there were all these women tugging on us to exchange our money for cambodian riehl, men grabbing our luggage to haul on carts across the border and men asking for bribes to get us through customs faster.... susan and i of course stuck $1 bills in our passports (u.s. dollars are like precious gold here!!!), however the guy wanted more. $2 per person, so we said forget it and just did it ourselves, it didn't take any longer and we had to wait for everyone on the bus to get through anyway.... once we were let out of vietnam, we had to walk about a kilometer to the cambodian border and go through customs there. it was really surreal actually, cuz like i said it was just as i imagained.
the bus from the border to phnom penh wasn't so great, actually it was the road, or lack of them that made it rough. so bumpy! there wasn't enough room in the bottom of the bus for our luggage so we had to store it on the bus wherever there was room.... which wasn't much. luckily they played decent western music instead of ethnic karoke as they often do in vietnam and china....
we arrived in phnom penh after fours and a brief ferry across the river. we pulled into the front of a mosque where there were children playing football. immediately they run over to the bus and start begging. one little boy jumped up and was hanging from the window trying to get money from us. that is the hardest part of cambodia, there are so many children begging. in china its mostly physically deformed or elderly, but its kids here and pretty hard to take.
there was one little boy who followed from me the beginning, cuz i usually talk to them instead of giving something. (sometimes i give in) anyway, he found me at the place we were eating, so i gave him some of my sandwich and a couple of french fries. its so hard, cuz really it does no good in the long run, but there are sooooo many of them everywhere!!
we ran into a couple of people here who are also in our program in china. albert and vikki. we all decided to hire a mini bus for today.
i don't know how much cambodian history people know, but i knew only a little about the killing fields and the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot. in the 70's he set up a prison called S-21 and tortured and killed people who were not for his revolution. including, children. they put the bodies in mass graves after killing them. after this was discovered they turned both the fields where the mass graves are and the prison into "museums". i believe over 9,000 people were killed in the prison and maybe more outside of the prison. anyway, it was the most intense and emmotional "tourist attraction" i have ever seen. more so than anne frank's house which was also very touching. anyway, when they discovered the graves and all of the bones of the victims, they still had clothes on them. they have put all of the skulls and some of the clothes into a "stupa"or memorial. the skulls are just stacked into this temple like structure and the clothes are piled in a glass case underneath. you can see on many of the skulls where the bullets blew out the back of the skull or where they were beaten and their skulls cracked... all this while a parade of children hang outside of the fence begging for just one dollar so they can eat....... as you walk around the fields where the mass graves once were there are still bits of bone and clothes sticking out of the ground.
the prison is of course not much better. there are mugshots of all the prisoners and you can see the terror on their faces. there are also pictures of the dead bloody bodies. very hard to handle. you can also see the cells where the prisoners were kept and there are still blood stains on the floor......
all of this was so horrible and of course much of the regime to this day denies the existence or involvement in the prison. and after all this which was only about 20-some years ago, the people here are so amazing! it may seem cliche, but i don't feel like i'm being taken advantage of like i did in vietnam and do in china. people here are so much more laid back..... its definitely the furtherst i've ever felt from home. such a poor and unstable country, but people just go on living there lives.... quite interesting.
alright, i'm sorry to be so depressing, but that is part of traveling in 3rd world countries. there are the really,really ugly sides to it. (much of the abuse to the prisoners was not unlike the recent events of abu garhib however). so, i've decided to never complain about anything in my life. i'm healthy, i'm traveling, and i get to eat (very well i might add) 3 meals a day.... 6 if i'm greedy!!
í hope this email finds everyone healthy and happy as well... more uplifting ridiculousness later!
nrj