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.

Pork, Goat Cheese, and Eggplant bruschetta

Shrimp Wontons

Khmer-style fried fish with vegetable

Roasted Vegetable Spring rolls

Kirk bought the Friends Restaurant cookbook and can't wait to cook some authentic Khmer food for our friends and family!

Phnom Penh City Tour - Imperial Palace

So we are going to skip ahead to real time for a bit (we'll come back to you Marine Corps Ball and Nagasaki, no worries! LOL) because we just returned from an amazingly awesome beyond words, whirlwind trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (formerly known as Saigon). We've been traveling around Japan quite a bit but have been wanting to branch out to some other countries for a while since we are so close. We were only able to take off for 7 days total so we did as much as we could. We will have to break the blog down into bits and pieces to fit it all in.

First off, we can't complain about the price of our plane tickets. We used our United air miles and so we got into Cambodia and out of Vietnam for only $30 each!!!! The bus ride between countries was only $13/apiece so travel costs were so minimal!

To get going, we had to drive about 3 hours to the Fukuoka Airport and out of there we flew to Bangkok, about a 6 hour flight. And can I just say that Thai Airways is AMAZING. Wow, you can absolutely tell a tremendous difference in service and care.  Anyways, from there we flew another hour-ish to Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia.

We were picked up by our hotel via Tuk Tuk, the main form of transportation in the city. And wow. I cannot even begin to describe the traffic in this place. No one abides by road rules or anything. It's incredibly scary and we found that we didn't really want to walk anywhere because it was too frightening, LOL. You get used to it for sure, but I'm glad we had good Tuk Tuk drivers throughout our stay who knew how to navigate through the craziness. :)

This is a Tuk Tuk

Our hotel was really nice... cheap for sure at $30/night. :) It included breakfast every morning and free  wireless. It was awesome and the folks at reception were super friendly and organized our bus ride to Vietnam later in the week.

The view from our breakfast table - the entire downstairs was open air with lots of plants and water fountains. It was hot and a bit humid in Cambodia. It probably hit 90F each day and this wasn't even their summer! But, the sun was GLORIOUS and felt so amazing!

Joel's breakfast croissant

My breakfast - fried chicken and noodles. There was fresh fruit too, which was so delicious!

So, for our first day, we planned a city tour trip with a local tour group, Mango Cambodia. Our guide, Chamruen, was AWESOME! He was very knowledgeable and answered all of our questions openly and honestly. He is studying to be a lawyer and hopes to move to the States when he is done with school.

Here's Chamreun with a gift we presented to the "head monk" at a Buddhist monastery. He taught us how to behave appropriately and show respect and we were blessed by the monk and splashed with water, ha ha!

Here is the group (of Thai women actually) that followed us in paying their respects to the monk. Apparently, these monks are not permitted to cook their own food or buy their own supplies so all of it is provided by folks in the community.

We were able to visit the Imperial Palace and these guys were playing some music out front.

Buddhism is the predominant religion in Cambodia

Within the ground are many shrines, lots of history, museums, and the home of the king and his family. The king doesn't really rule the country, he is more of a figure head.

Lots and lots of Buddha's

We weren't permitted to actually enter into the royal home but we allowed to gaze upon it... apparently the royal family doesn't go out a whole lot

Random guardian figure

Elephants were a huge part of Cambodian culture

This is a Bodhi tree. It's really unique looking with lots of symbolism for the Buddhist religion as it is the tree under which Buddha is said to have reached enlightenment

This was only the very beginning of our first day! There's so much more!! :)

Mount Misen Hike

We could keep going with all of the other places we went while in Okinawa, but we think it's time to move on to some of the other things we were able to do before the end of 2012... but one final image from Okinawa: JELLYFISH. Yes, tis true, we ate jellyfish. It was cooked/boiled a tad and smothered in some type of Italian dressing... tasted kind of like gummy bears with that kind of texture too. Ick. Worth doing once to say you did it. Never again.

So moving on: y'all have already seen pics from our couple of other visits to Miyajima Island, but back in October, we went specifically to hike while it was still pleasant outside and the fall foliage was in full color (and of course, to eat oysters, always Miyajima to eat fresh oysters). There's a cable car option to take to the top of Mount Misen, but we opted to tough it out and do the hike, which turned out to be a little over a mile. Doesn't sound like much, but let me tell you, a mile straight up a mountain feels like a marathon, LOL!

It's so funny to me - Joel and I feel like we're in pretty good shape, but man, when it comes to some of these steep, uphill, stair climbing type hikes, we get worn out FAST! But, all these older Japanese folks just truck it up the mountain-side like it's nothing. When we hear them coming behind us, we act like we're going strong and not out of breath, but as soon as they pass us (we lie to ourselves that "allowing" them to pass us doesn't really give us away), we stop for a rest and to catch our breath! The things we do to save our image... :)

Gotta have a picture of the giant Torii Gate from the ferry

Grilled oysters!

Fried oysters!

Largest rice spoon in the world

We had to stop and take pictures of all the beautiful trees... it was a great time of year to come to the Island

Getting distracted on our way to the mountain... this statue was several hundred thousand dollars!

Nice to know that if we run a little, we can cut 3 minutes off our time to the mountain, LOL

These are nice stairs here at the start of the hike... it turns in to rock slabs, packed earth, and fallen trees in just a few seconds up

Koi pond

Nice benches to sit and enjoy the scenery

Lots of folks from base come here to get their family pictures taken at this time of year

Almost to the top!

Trust me, you want to chill when  you get to the top... you're tuckered out and the scenery is just stunning

I believe this picture is of Hiroshima

 

LOTS of islands

We stopped at the fire hall, which is practically at the top of the mountain... pretty cool, but SO smokey!

We followed these steps up a ways more to see shrines and such

More scenic shots from the hike down the mountain

We love to take pictures of Japanese signs... these two were on the train ride back to Iwakuni :-p

Well, would you?

 Japan is so fun. :)