Farewell Cambodia!

Well, it has been good. I have really enjoyed myself here! The country is pretty beautiful, hot, but really beautiful! For the last meal here Matt and I ate dinner at the FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) and watched the sunset over the National Museum.

I have wanted to go to Cambodia for such a long time, mostly fueled by my desire to see Angkor Wat, but more recently (err...high school) because of the Killing Fields. The Killing Fields and the prison/torture museum we visited today were amazing in a whole different way - amazingly horrifying. I have watched that movie several times over the past years and have wanted to come to see the areas where these events happened. The museum is housed in the former prison. It is pretty creepy - they set up some of the exhibits in the former cells, also, they left lots of the cells intact so you can enter them. In some of the cells, they still had the frames of the beds out with a pair of shackles, ammo box, spade (sometimes), and a photo on the wall of one of the victims spread out with blood splattered all over the floor where you are currently standing. Truly horrifying.

The museum was mostly identification photos of all of the inmates - men, women and children. But they had some paintings of the kinds of torture the prisoners were subject to as well as some gruesome photos of people who where killed - one man didn't have a face left. Also, there were a couple of special exhibits with survivors telling about their time, people who never saw their loved ones again, and a short exhibit on the former guards of the facility. Emphasis on "short" in that previous sentence as not many had come forward to tell their stories.

Anyhow, tomorrow morning we will begin our 8 hour bus journey to Saigon. I hope I won't get too bus sick, but I have some good peppermint and camphor oil just in case. So, the next time I write will be from Vietnam!

PS - I wrote out postcards for many of you, but have been way to lazy about mailing them here, so I will mail them from Vietnam or from China. Talk to you later!