The Dillers are in Japan!: Phnom Penh City Tour - Temple, Killing Fields, Friends Restaurant

For the second part of our Phnom Penh city tour we continued to learn more about the culture and history of Cambodia. We visited the Wat Phnom pagoda, Khmer Surin Restaurant, Choeung Ek Genocidal Center and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. We did end the evening on a positive note at the Friends Restaurant. BE WARNED! This post contains some pictures from the Genocide museums and although we've tried to be discrete we still feel it's important to convey the history we learned. So if you are sensitive you may want to consider skipping to the end where we show some of the delicious food from the Friends restaurant we ate later in the evening.

Continuing on in Phnom Penh, we visited the Wat Phnom pagoda which is a Buddhist temple built in the 14th century and is the tallest religious structure in the city. The day we visited was during the celebration following the Chinese New Year, so it was very busy as it is local custom to visit the temple for good karma.


The Wat Phnom pagoda.

A giant clock donated to the temple by China. It was actually working.

The locals performing the custom of feeding this statue bacon and eggs.

Inside the temple there is a large bronze Buddha and many smaller statues.


There were many murals on the walls depicting the Buddha's enlightenment.

This is woven statue of a Naga, which is a seven-headed snake and is a very important symbol for the Cambodia people.

We were dropped of at the local marketplace, which is where everyone in Phnom Penh go to engage in commerce. There was a very large indoor market with vendors selling everything from t-shirts, watches, sunglasses to clothes, cooking supplies and toiletries. There was also a restaurant section where you could stop off and buy a tasty lunch.

Kirk ordered some shrimp and rice with vegtables.

I ordered some chicken pieces with rice and vegtables. The cost for both dishes and two Ankor beers cost about $4.

The local butcher shop.

Local seafood market.

For our lunch break we ate at the Khmer Surin restaurant.

Kirk had a good chicken and pineapple dish.

I ordered the beef Lok Lak, which is a very traditional Cambodian dish. Little did I know that I would be making this same dish in our culinary class the next day! Stay tuned for that blog post next.

Here starts the trip to the Genocidal Center and Killing Fields. This was not a pleasant place to go after a delicious lunch, but it did serve as a good history lesson for us. The Choeung Ek site is the most well known of the over 300 killing fields throughout Cambodia. It is estimated that the Khmer Rouge executed around 17,000 here at this field (of the estimated 2 million total executed) Cambodians under the Pol Pot regime.

After you walk in the front gate you first encounter the Memorial Stupa, which acts as a shrine containing the bones of all the victims that have been exhumed from the mass graves.

There is a vendor selling flowers and incense that you can purchases to show respect to those who lost their lives.

The bones of the victims were excavated, treated, and categorized by age and sex. The shine contained 13 levels of different categories of bones.

The clothes of the victims.

A few of the mass graves.

This area was first excavated in 1980, but not all the bodies were found so bones continue to appear through out this area, especially after heavy rains. The time and cost to continue searching is so great, so this box contains the pieces that continue to surface after the initial excavation in 1980.

Clothes that are starting to surface from one of the graves.

A bone beginning to appear.

After the killing fields, we visited the S.21 Tuol Sleng genocide museum where the Khmer Rouge interrogated and tortured many Cambodians. This was a former high school that was converted into the security office created by Pol Pot in April 1975 for detention and interrogation/torture of those suspected of being traitors. It is estimated that around 10,000 prisoners made their way through this building, where the average detention time was 2 to 4 months. This museum was especially difficult and we did not take many pictures as we will not want to re-live those images again.

It was an amazing day exploring the city and extremely educational. Our guide, Chamreun, was great and ready to answer any and all of our questions about the Cambodian culture and history. Kirk and I found a lot of what we learned incredibly sad but now we both have much greater respect for the Cambodian people and how much the country has developed since the decimation of nearly half of their most educated population (Pol Pot intentionally sought out the educated and well off to execute because he saw them as a potential threat to the success of his regime).

To end on a more positive note, that evening we ate the Friends Restaurant, a creative tapas restaurant a few streets back from the riverfront and a five minute tuk tuk ride from our hotel. It was created as "a training restaurant for former street youth."

The Friends restaurant opened it's doors in 2001 as part of a training initiative of the Cambodian non-government organization Mith Samlahn/Friends. The initiative was designed to train former street kids in the skills of hospitality in an envirnoment that encourages self-confidence and self-expression.