Genocide museum & 1st trip to market

We decided to do the genocide museum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum this day, the 13th of January, and not hire a driver to go to the Killing Fields http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields as we had lingered a bit too long at breakfast. This experience at the museum turned out to be so informative that we felt that we did not have to go to the fields where 10's of thousands were clubbed to death. This was a school that was converted to a prison where interrogations and torturing occurred. Certainly, not a museum most people enjoy but it is a hugh part of the recent Cambodian history and deeply moving and something we wanted to learn about. Including these links will be a way for us to go back and revisit our journey. We got a much better understanding of what happened here between 1975 and 1979. What we have noticed is how relatively few old people there are here and realized that roughly 2.5 million people were killed by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge out of the 8 million Cambodians that lived here back in the mid 70's. Almost 1/3 of the population were murdered. What is truly amazing is that as horrific and unconscionable that period was that today (our very short observation) these people are so very kind and gentle and obviously forgiving. However, there are currently trials going on here in PP where 5 former Khmer leaders are being tried for their involvement in these atrocities.








After the museum we headed to the Russian Market. By the way, one takes tuk tuks everywhere here in the city.


The market extremely dense but easily navigated. We even ran into Kea who works at our hotel. She was shopping for her birthday party dinner that night. She tuned 25. There are 1.4 million people in PP - what are the odds of that? There are also very few tourists. Michael said that last year there were about 2 million tourists that visited Cambodia compared to say Spain that had 20 million.




















We headed back to our hotel and later met up with Michael for dinner.