Maja Nordlund

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Much more life in this city compaired to Siemp Reap (maybe bacause it's bigger..?) Came here late one evening, and after meeting a new friend with which we found a nice hotel, we decided to spend the rest of the evening at the hotel, drinking amazing lassis! For those of you who don't know what a lassi is, I'm gonna tell you that it's never the same as the last one you tried. A lassi at one restaurant can be a mix of ice and milk, another one have yoghurt and fresh fruit, and a third one have milk and sweetened fruit-flavour. The second one is the best.

 

Next day me, Evelina, and our new friend Theresa from Austria, went to the Killing Fields, which is the place where the cruel former Cambodian leader Pol Pot brought normal Cambodian city dwellers and made sure they never came back. He wanted a society without education and urban development, so he basically killed everyone he thought looked smart and educatied. The Killing Fields is the place for the mass-graves of all those people. 3 million to be exact. 3 million of his own people. That's crazy.

 

We got a headset with a speaking guide on our own language as we walked around the fields. We saw the dried up mudgraves along with signs of how many people who had been laying in just that grave, and if there were men or women or children. Some spots in the ground were enclosed by a small chain. This was beacuse there's still clothes from the victims comming up from the soil when the heavy rain washes over the fields. So we could accutally see the clothes they'd worn on their last day of life. That's a feeling.

 

In a large stone-monument they'd collected some of the sculls from the victims, and laid them in 17 levels all the way up to the cealing. By looking at the sculls you could see how just that person got killed - maybe with a bullet, a machete or an axe. The 17 levels represented the start of Pol Pot's regim.

 

After this, we went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which acctually is the prison S-21, were 20.000 Cambodian prisoners were killed. Here we walked around in the cells, the "big" ones made for up to 30 men, and in the small (tiny!) ones they got chained to the wall. And as if that wasn't enough, the prisoners of course got tortured every now and then. And of course they took pictures of this. Not a nice view. Hard to grasp...

The former prison S-21

 

After this heavy morning, we went back to the city for some lunch. We decided to try the Cambodian national dish Amok - a stew with either fish or chicken mixed with coconut and vegetables (and of course rice!). After this we took a cheap (but really good) massage and a frozen yoghurt! In the evening we met another new friend, Tess, from Holland. So with half Europe united we took some drinks at the hotel before we went out in the Cambodian nightlife. This was a sunday so it wasn't so much of that, but we drank some drinks in a streetbar (my piña colada was almost only Malibu...) and went in and quickly out again of a nightclub. Then we ended up at a backpacker bar, were we could relax without people fighting, staring or calling on us. :)