Our Saturdays are all starting to sound the same. We arrived in town a bit earlier on Friday, so we were able to walk the scorching streets a bit and visit the National Palace and Silver Pagoda (though why any one would have a temple covered with 5000 silver tiles and decide to keep them covered all the time is beyond me). Then we got some food and hid out in our bunker for most of the next 25 hours (ok, 24, we may have gotten a bit of a late start. We really should start checking sunset times.) In between reading a napping a lot we did trek out during the afternoon where we found what we've been looking for all week. I'm not so sure why it took until yesterday to find, but we came across some fresh copies of the new Harry Potter on DVD! I mean come on people, what took so long?? Sadly it was Shabbat still so we could not actually buy it. Foiled again. After dinner and a quick look at the way overpriced menu at the apparently famous Foriegn Correspondents Club on the river (damn those fellas at the freakin FCC), we decided to call it a night. Luckily our hotel got some great TV channels, so we got to watch an English movie with (didn't get the name) with English subtitles. That provided loads of entertainment, my favorite mistranslation being when they turned "my business associates" into "the business of no shit."
Today we went through the usual T'sha B'av activities - just a few days too early and kind of focused on a different group of people. We visited the Killing Fields and the museum of Tuol Sleng on the site of the former torture/prison camp on the site of a former high school. Parts of it were well done, parts were sort of falling apart, but we did learn a bit about what went on here in the 70's (and afterwards for about 20 years, which is the part that I still don't understand.) Adina was struck by how stupid/ignorant some of the people signing the guest book came off as, as if they had never heard of any of this, or as if this type of thing doesn't go on in the world. We also liked how several of them compared George Bush to Pol Pot. Seemed a bit harsh. I'm not sure Adina should be so judgemental, after all it was her who actually laughed as we walked through one of the prison cells. What kind of person does that? My joke wasn't even that funny!
I suppose I'm glad we did this today, though it really served to reinforce my determination never to visit Poland, especially the camps and ghetto sites.
Phnom Phen in general neither of us were such big fans of. It's a vibrant, growing city, it just doesn't have a particularily pleasant atmosphere. Perhaps if the rivers it was built around actually looked blue every once in a while. It's also a bit too chaotic for our tastes, though you have to admire how easy it is for locals to drive a motorcycle into two lanes of intersecting traffic knowing that somehow they'll make it through. That's courage. And a good portion of the tuk tuk drivers were less persistant than the ones in Siem Reap, which I appreciated (for the record I still say "No, thank you" instead of ""Really? You think I'm going to get into your tuk tuk right after you saw me say no to three other guys? Do you have some sort of magic tuk tuk that I should know about? Get out of my face!" So I think I should be commended for that).
Right now we're waiting for our delayed flight back to Thailand and hoping we still make our night bus to the islands later tonight. Keep your fingers crossed for us. We'd hate to have to delay paradise for another day, I know you'd all feel very sad for us. After traveling for four and a half weeks, we're definitely ready for the vacation part of our vacation to start.
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