Phnom Penh = Educational but Depressing

Okay, it's been ages! My bad! I have been everywhere in just the last few weeks, so I will do my best to sum everything up!

As the title might hint, Phnom Penh was not anywhere near the top of my list of places visited. I last left off saying I was spending the night in the Laos capital of Vientiane. WORST NIGHT EVER!! I got into bed thinking I would be getting a beautiful 8 hrs of sleep after all the chaos that was Vang Vien, and I so far from right it was not even funny. I pulled my pillow away and saw a mosquito fly away, and I thought, "Not a good sign, but it's only one mosquito." WRONG WRONG WRONG!! I was in bed for maybe 10 minutes before I felt two bumps in a row on  my arm and it itched. I sprinted to the bathroom thinking it was bed bugs (bc I am ultra paranoid about that--no thanks to my friend Jess for that one!), but was actually relieved that it was just a couple of mosquito bites. I threw some cream on them and tried sleeping the other way. No luck. Within 15 minutes not only are both of my arms itching, but now my feet are, too! OMG! Then my face started itching and it just got to be way too much. I spent the entire night sweating away under a blanket and sheet with pants and a t-shirt on, constantly putting anti-histamine cream and 95% deet on my ever increasing number of bites while the girl I was rooming with slept super soundly in her tiny shorts and tank top (without a sheet, I might add) snoring and passing gas. I "woke up" and counted 80 bites--some of which were on my eye lid so that was now swollen. Like I said: WORST NIGHT EVER! What a horrendous way to end my amazing high point of fun in Laos. :(

Arrived to my hostel in scorching hot Phnom Penh only to realize that there was almost no one staying at my hostel.  I tried to make friends with this semi-American guy, but it didn't really work out and I ended up spending most of my day just wandering about the city on my own. I have never seen as many Range Rovers, Lexuses, and Mercedes as I saw in that city--not even in NYC. For real. It's insane how crazy the gap is between the wealthy and the poor here. I spent my afternoon at a high school that was converted into a the famous S-21 Prison, where far too many people were tortured or killed during the Khmer reign in Cambodia in the late 1970s. It was awful to walk through because the pictures in all the rooms were so graphic. It was literally like walking through another concentration camp in Germany. 

I spent the next morning at the Killing Fields, which is where they took prisoners from S-21 to be executed and buried in mass graves.  It was eerie to walk around a place where so many people had been killed so brutally. There were still remants of clothing and bone coming up out of the ground where graves hadn't been uncovered yet along the walking path. There was even this beautiful tree that was apparently used to kill children with. I won't get into the details of how that worked though--too ridiculous. There were pictures, left over bits of clothing, bones of the dead, stains on the walls of the cells--absolutely devastating. It's so crazy to  imagine this mass murder occurring so close to our lifetime. I mean, I know it is happening so much in other parts of the world as I write this, but to be around the remanants of it was really unsettling.

I did see other parts of Phnom Penh during my 2 day stint there with some other people I met from my hostel, but the really important part of seeing this city was to really try to learn about the history of Cambodia. I had NO IDEA about any of this before I even went there. So even though I had a miserable time here because of the depressing nature of why I came, I am really glad I did because I'm really interested in reading up on the history of the Khmer regime and how everything that came to happen was actually allowed to happen by the world community. (I read somewhere that the UN actually gave the regime a seat? What the heck??)  I'm on the lookout for a book called First They Killed My Father. It's a true story about what a girl went through during this time. If anyone has it, give me a shout!

Next stop, Siam Reap!