Phnom Penh, Cambodia

We started our time in Cambodia in the city of Phnom Penh. Our hotel was located a couple of miles from the tourist area, and as a result there were lots of local shops and markets. My favorite was the night market which would appear each evening at sunset just a block away. I was excited to try new food in Cambodia and I wasn't disappointed. Everything was pretty cheap with internet at 30 cents an hour and most meals were only a dollar. The interesting thing is that when you use your ATM card in Cambodia, instead of dispensing the local currency of riel, it gives dollars. Dollars are used for most purchases and your given riel as change.

Our second day there we visited a shooting range outside of the city and found the prices to be a lot higher then we expected. So we stuck to trying out an M16. If you had the money you could shoot just about anything. Backpacker legend has it that in the villages up in the mountains you can shoot a leper if you name the right price. Yes, a leper, like a human with the disease of leprosy. The scary part is that I've heard this story from quite a few people, some who have claimed to have first or secondhand knowledge of such going ons. Well I'm just going to keep on believing it's a legend.

The next morning we took a minibus to the outskirts of the city to the "Killing Fields" where the Khmer Rouge killed thousands of people and buried them in mass graves. Afterwards we visited a highschool that the Khmer Rouge turned into a brutal prison known as S-21. A popular book sold in Cambodia was "First They Killed my Father". My freshman year of college our grade was required to read this book before school started, and in the fall the author came to AU and told us about how she barely survived the Khmer Rouge. It touched me of course reading her book and hearing her speak in person, but not in the same way as when I actually visited the spot where the atrocities occured. That's one of my favorite parts of travelling; having the ability to take information and learning that was once detached and foriegn and make it real. I've read a lot of books detailing the accounts of Auschwitz survivors, but it wasn't until this summer when I visited the camp that I was able to really begin to take in the full scale of what happened there.


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