The Long & Winding Road

Yesterday we switched guesthouses because someone stole $50 from Matts shorts out of our room.  We also wanted to check out another part of town.  Today we hired a tuk-tuk driver to take us to all of the sights in and around Phnom Penh.  We started the day going to the Killing Fields which is where Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime killed thousands of innocent Cambodians during his brutal reign of terror during the 70's.  It was pretty crazy being at the sight of mass graves, the freaky part is that they have only dug up like half of them so there are still thousands of skeletons under the ground.  After leaving the Killing Fields, we headed over to Tuol Sleng Prison aka S-21 which served as a jail and torture centre from '75-'79.  The place really gave me the creeps with all the black and white photos of all the victims inside.  We also saw the rooms where the poor, innocent people were tortured for being educated or just because they were from the city instead of being country folk.  I still can't beleive that all of this happened so recently.  While the rest of the modern world was going through the hippie liberal 70's, Cambodians were being killed for nothing except to help Pol Pot's view of a perfect egalitarian society.  It really opens your eyes to the problems in the world today looking at this sort of thing though.  It also makes me thank God I was born in a peaceful, prosporous country that gave me the opportunity to do something with my life.  After the depressing morning, we headed to the National Museum after a bite to eat.  The museum was really cool and the courtyard was really beautiful.  Lots of really cool artifacts from the temples we had seen in Siem Reap a couple weeks before.  We then checked out the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda.  It was cool but I think Thailand's Royal Palace was definitely more impressive.