Phnom Penh - Pol Pot did some bad things
17/12/2009 - 20/12/2009
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Around the world ın 8 months
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Back in the capital, we picked up my visa and did some walking around.
There are international schools every 2 blocks, it seems, though at some points it gets ridiculous. Here is the very fancy Hello American Kindergarten, in a nicer building than any school I know of in North America (granted, I only know public schools).
Here's a random temple.
An asian cartoon cat from hell, I think Hell Kitty is the next big thing.
We went to the S-21 war museum, at a former school that was turned into a torture building and prison under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. It was a stark reminder of what men can do, and the notion that some must be stopped. Under this particular version of communism, original farmers became landowners and people from the cities (including those that had recently moved from the countryside in search of opportunity) were legally second-class citizens, without the same rights or legal protections. After the world said "never again" after WWII, we let it happen again, and it would likely have been completely unchecked if communism hadn't been the enemy at the time (as fascism might have a generation earlier if Germany hadn't attacked so many of its neighbors, and as it apparently is in Darfur). This is still a step less than what we saw in the war remnants museum in Saigon, but that's another post for another day.
Here is a typical room in the first building, which housed high-ranking officials from the prior government.
There are many, many pictures of prisoners.
Pictures of what was dug up from mass graves
The next building was another residence complex for prisoners of the regimes, but with much smaller cells and barbed wire preventing escape into the courtyard (or suicide by jumping from a 4-th story window)
Drawings of the conditions of the time
Actual skulls from the mass graves.
On to less aggreiving sights, we walked past the independence monument and Vietnam-Cambodia Friendship Monument en route to the Royal Residence and Silver Pagoda (which had unfortunately reached capacity for the day, so we couldn't enter).
More temple
Big hot pot dinner, though a bit overpriced at $10 for two.
Posted by chrisvasil 07:24 Archived in Cambodia Tagged tourist_sites Comments (0)