The Gift Shop at the Genocide Museum

                                        

I dreamed about my mother. I was sleeping in my dream. My head was in her lap, and she was brushing back my hair and kissing my forehead.

Awake at first light and saw in a guide that a coffee shop was close by and open. Showered and went down there. Leaving the apartment (those stairs!) was a little difficult. There was a motorcycle that was almost the exact size of the lobby. I had to climb over it.

Walking outside triggered all the tuk tuk drivers who sleep in the alley. Want ride, want tuk tuk?

It was actually getting a little stressful having to disappoint so many people who badly needed your two or three bucks.

Here in Cambodia, they actually smile back when you smile and say "no, thank you." In Hanoi, they would scowl and sometimes their friends would mock them. No one wants to ride with you! A much friendlier acceptance of rejection here.

However, the pressure of trying to minimize those interactions means you don't stand still and look at a map really. Where are you trying to go? I take you!

So I just walked. The streets here are numbers on the map but have names on the signs, so it's sort of a guessing game. I guessed wrong and walked away from the coffee shop. So, I was just you know, in Phnom Penh. I explored.

The area I was in had a lot of government buildings and an enormous monument surrounded by a massive roundabout. It's called The Independence Monument and sort of looks like a Khmer rocket ship. A park stretched out for miles beyond it. I watched boys play some sort of game where they kicked a long beanbag back and forth. I called it footminton.

In general, throughout Southeast Asia, you see folks in parks playing netless badminton or exercising in groups. This was a new one, a kind of floaty hackysack.

One of the government buildings had a gorgeous art-deco fence, but when I took a picture of it, guards came out of nowhere and pointed to the Independence Monument. The message was clear - you want to take a picture of something? There you go, that's what it's for.

It still wasn't quite 7am and I wasn't having too much difficulty crossing the street. They have the same deal here with motorcycles and the "no rules, just right," method of getting from Point A to Point B. It's as dangerous and anarchic as Hanoi, but... it was early and I was able to cross over lanes and only get nearly killed instead of almost certainly killed.

A little pho kitchen was open, so I went on in. One lady served the food and one lady ladled the broth. I still needed coffee, but they didn't speak English, but coffee sounds the same in most languages, but... she still wasn't getting it. Coffee? Ka-fay? Coughy? Um.... I drew a picture of a mug with steam lines coming out of it.

She nodded and came back with coffee!

The pho was great and kept up with the theme of having dinner for breakfast. They don't seem to differentiate here. People just eat what they're hungry for when they want it. There was a little shrine in the corner with some snack cakes on it. Twinkies for Buddha.

Quiet little breakfast and I went out for more poking around. I had arranged to meet Liam at 10am, so I still had plenty of time. Eventually found the coffee place I was looking for in the first place.

It was called Costa and... it costa lot. Hoo boy, I've been waiting to use that one for a week! Big, "Western-style" coffee shop with absurd drinks like a "popcorn latte" which was coffee with foam on top and sprinkled with kernels of popcorn.

That's how they drink it in New York and Paris, we swear.

I spent more on an iced coffee there than on a bowl of pho, a side of greens, and a hot coffee at the breakfast place. Stoopid.

Outside, though, I saw a monk in an orange wraprobe open an orange umbrella and I lost my cool. It was so beautiful and strange. I followed him until I could get a shot. He was going to different businesses and trading prayers for money.

It felt good to get excited. I set the pricey coffee down during the chase and I lost track of it.

City was waking up now and there was more traffic. The sidewalks have more room to walk on here, the business I could see was going on in actual storefronts.

Back at the hotel, I wanted to clean up, but the water was off. I wrote my host, and he was like, "It's off at my place too. Cambodia, right?"

I went back down to find Liam. Those stairs! That lobbycycle!  He was there all right. He was like, "Ok, next stop, the Killing Fields!" and I was like, "Ahh, I want to go see this market and this palace," and he was like, "Killing Fields it is," and I was like, "Ummm,"

When I was in Poland I made a point of avoiding Auschwitz. I've read about it, I don't need to see it. Like, was I going to take a selfie at the "Arbeit Mach Frei" gate? Was I supposed to be like, "Hashtag really important, you guys. I'm serious, guys. Hashtag frowning. Shaking my head."

But here Liam seemed almost offended that I didn't want to go, almost like I was rejecting his culture and his people. He was like, "You NEED to see this," so I was like, ok. Then he was like, "ok," so he drove me one block and was like, "I have to go to English class, this is my brother Lim. He doesn't speak English too well, but he knows where you want to go."

Ah, the old Cambodian Liam-to-Lim dodge. You paid for Liam, but you got Lim.

Lim seemed earnest and honest behind his airmask, so I was like, "Fine!" and we were off.

Very cool escape from the city down dirt roads and through crowded markets and fields with more of those hunchbacked white cows. Dudes with carts of Pepsi, Fanta, and Coke bottles full of gross yellow liquid were everywhere. It took me way too long to realize it was gasoline. That's how you tank up here.

School kids on bikes, woman with large baskets of fruit, machine shops, colorful power drills hanging from their cords like pheasants on a string. Industry. Commerce.

Huge garbage trucks painted like birds. Fascinating ceremonial trash buses.

I got pretty dusty in my open-air carriage, but I felt like I looked cool in my $3 Ray Ban knockoffs.

Lim seemed to get a little lost at some point and we nosed down a few nowhere alleys with faded cell phone ads, but he was just poking around looking for a backstreet. He found it, and we sneaked up on The Killing Fields.

                                              

(not my pic)

This was a very sad place where the veil of my ignorance surrounding the reign of Pol Pot and the story of Cambodian genocide was lifted from me. It's one of the most moving/powerful museums/memorials I've been to. There was a really excellent audio guide. 

In a nutshell, after WWII the French tried to retake their colonies here and were kicked back out. Then the Americans came here to "fight Communism" and then they lost/left, and then... there was a power vacuum. 

Which is a story we're seeing all over the world right now. And I guess there's no excuse for it? Like, if nothing else, the government did an excellent job in the 80s of making our deserved humiliation and failure in Vietnam seem like it was the people's fault that it didn't succeed. If you had only supported the troops, guys, it would have gone differently, guys. 

When we kicked off GWI after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the narrative was, "We can win this if you just stop criticizing the military and the government. If you hadn't spit on Vietnam vets and protested in the streets during that war, we would have won it."

"Patriotism" was redefined to mean, "Accept what the government says is right when it comes to wars."

Take pictures of the tower not the gates.  

"Support Our Troops" sounds the same as "Home of the Whopper" to me and means, "Think about these sexy young people. Don't they have cool clothes and faces? Don't question why we're sending them off to kill and die. They're definitely fighting for your freedom and not for Exxon, we swear to god. They're doing this for you and not for Boeing. Definitely." 

We will be at war for the rest of our lives, because it's the only thing we make. It's our leading export. Which, you know, is good for business. "Support Our Troops" doesn't mean anything different than those Soviet worker statues where the guy has a hammer or a woman is farming. Soldiers are our farmers, they are the American Worker, they're porn stars. 

Pol Pot fired up all the poor people, gave them guns and told them the "rich" were exploiting them and needed to die. "Rich people" were defined as anyone with soft hands, wore eyeglasses, could read, etc.  Then the definition expanded to include, anyone who isn't already on their side, folks who weren't down with the sickness or had too much fancy book learnin'.

It's the usual tactic. It worked in France and Russia and China and in most revolutions. It would work in the US if we didn't believe that being poor was our own fault.

So this place is mostly empty land with a giant stupa in the center. A stupa, I learned, is a Buddhist memorial structure and place for reflection. This one is packed with the skulls of the people murdered here.

The revolution swept through the country, packing folks into trucks and bringing them out here away from the city to be murdered.

There are still teeth and bones in the ground where you walk. You can see them. I saw them. The "litter" on the ground is actual scraps of clothing from the corpses. There's a lake still bubbling with corpse gases. They haven't dredged all the bodies out yet. You're standing on bodies, walking on them.

It's an incredibly sobering and moving experience. And nobody helped these people. The murderous government of Pol Pot was accepted as legit by the UN and when folks would escape and try to tell the world what was happening, nobody believed it.

And there was zero will to help out after Vietnam. Just like now we don't want to go into Syria and didn't go into Darfur or Rwanda. We really only helped out in Bosnia to distract from Clinton's blowjob. We had genocide fatigue.

Also, there was no Twitter then.

So, we decided not to believe it, the whole world decided this, some Swedish ambassadors came here on a fact-finding mission and were shown some "Potemkin Villages," and said it wasn't so bad here after all and you shouldn't believe the rumors, and millions of people were killed.

"Purified"

Bullets were too expensive, so they killed them with old farm tools and, in some cases, cut their throats with hard palm leaves. They have these things on display. They blasted music from the trees during the killings so that the people yet to be killed and waiting in the holding pens wouldn't panic.

It went on like this for YEARS until the Vietnamese got sick of the refugees and some expansion attempts at the border and they came in to regulate. I burst into tears at that. Someone had to help them, and it was the Vietnamese. Not Thailand, which shared a border and stole all their culture through the centuries, not the US or the French, whose policies and occupation made this situation possible, but the war-weary overstretched Vietnamese.

This was all in the 70s, and they are still recovering from the murder of 25% of the population.

So... terrible but important, and I was glad Liam insisted. There was a gift shop, but I didn't go inside. I found Lim, and he took me away. I wanted to take a picture of a weird old market building, but he drove me to a school instead.

The school was used as a prison during the genocide, so.... after your breakfast of genocide, we suggest pairing it with a side order of genocide.

Anyway, fucking terrible. Giant classrooms filled with photographs of the prisoners as they were checked in. Endless corridors of terrified, crying, beaten faces. It was like a yearbook. Most likely to be lashed with wire. Most likely to be thrown off a balcony.

There was a display of a few people who knew how to paint or fix cars, and they were allowed to live because the guards wanted their portraits taken or their jeeps repaired.

I couldn't stand it for more than an hour.

These signs were everywhere, which I think mean, "No laughing at the genocide museum."

I bought some water for Lim and myself and asked him to take me please to the market for real this time. I expected he would just take me to a graveyard, but after a thrilling race through a completely awakened city, we found what I was looking for.

Big, cool, old domed building with a really interesting design. It's pretty surrounded by other buildings, so difficult to photograph. I got some decent shots of the interior. Sort of.

Then I asked him to take me to the royal palace and to go away. He took me to the river instead. I paid him and waved goodbye. In retrospect, making it to the market seemed like an accident. Every other time, he just picked someplace and drove there.

I brushed off more tuk tuk drivers and stopped into a hostel to ask if they knew where the bus station was. The guy was like, "You can buy the ticket here," and I was like, "Ok, where is the bus station?" and his answer was essentially, "Buy your ticket here, and I'll tell you."

Everything's a hustle in this town. So, I bought a ticket for Ho Chi Minh City for the morning and he told me where the station was. It was across the street. So, I went over there to see if the ticket I had just bought was real. It was.

When I stepped out, I was surrounded by tuk tuk drivers who wanted to know where I was going.

Hey, pretty lady! You're looking good! You going to your boyfriend's house? How long does it take to shave those legs, baby? That your real hair color? Oh, honey, you don't know what you're doing to me. Honey, it ain't fair.

                                              

(not my pic)

I had a picture of some street art I'd seen online, and I was like, "Whichever one of you assholes knows where this is, you can take me there," and they all gathered 'round and were like, "No, ummm, no... this is Phonm Penh?" and one old guy was like, "I know where it is, I think," and I was like, "You think or you know?" and he was like, "Know!"  

But he probably meant "No."

He didn't have a tuk tuk. He had a motorcycle. So I had my first "xe om," which means "Hug Ride" which means you get on the back and hold onto the driver and become one of the thousands of people you're afraid of the rest of the time. 

It was awesome. I loved the way it felt. Maybe I'll buy a Vespa when I get home and be afraid it will get stolen or damaged!

He dropped me off a few blocks away at the National Museum.

I cracked up. Oh, you sweet old man. If it's art, it must be in the museum. You dear thing.

I could see the palace in the distance, so I got rid of him and walked over there. It was closed. ANOTHER tuk tuk driver was like, "What's up?" and I was like, "At least the tuk tuk drivers survived the genocide," and then I wondered how many of the older ones had taken part in it, and then I banished my own shameful thoughts and that sort of speculation.

He was like, "Palace is closed for lunch, but I know everything in the city. I've been driving for twenty years. Yup, not a corner in Phnom Penh I don't know. I can take you to the Hill Temple, the Monkey Temple, the Golden Temple. All over, really. Anything you want. Then I'll take you back here to see the palace when it's open."

I showed him my street art picture, and he was like, "The museum, maybe?"

I was like, "Just take me to the monkey temple,"

So, I took the Secret Temple Tour.

Which was fan-fucking-tastic, actually. He really did know where all the cool stuff was hiding. He even showed me a tree filled with enormous bats. They were just hanging out there. I climbed the steps of a temple dedicated to stray animals and had my heart broken at the sweetness of seeing monks feeding kittens and puppies.

Everybody got some.

They were rows of birds in cages, and you could pay a buck to release them. So, I paid a buck. The monk told me you're supposed to tell the bird what you want to happen, and the bird will fly to God and tell him. Hey, sparrow, tell him I want a Red Ryder BB gun.

I held the bird in my hand, it was very still, and I whispered the name of a friend of mine going through a rough time. He flew into the trees and out of sight.

Found the Tour Guide downstairs and he took me across the river to The Golden Temple. Which was also amazing. Deserted but for snoozing monks. Huge murals and more enormous statues of monkey people trying to restrain cobra things.

I bought myself some water and bought him a Red Bull, and we were off again. He tried to get me to pay extra to see a silk-making facility. He figured maybe I was a live one, but I wasn't a live one. We found the monkey temple, which was crawling with monkeys. Actual monkeys, just like I've always wanted to see. 

There is usually fruit for sale for you to feed them, but it was the time of day where the fruit seller is getting a massage, so nothing doing. The driver was like, "No fruit now, so stay away from the big monkey."

I didn't need the warning. I was very aware that even the smallest monkey could ruin my good looks, tear off my person through my jeans and sell my camera on ebay with little difficulty. I used the zoom lens. 

It was incredibly sweet to watch them groom one another and play. 

He couldn't talk me into the jewelry store (for wife might like?) or the garden gnome Buddha factory (for mother like?) and he took me back to the palace. He had done a really good job. Took me to interesting, almost deserted, places where I had some memorable visual and personal experiences.

I had blown a lot of money on tuk tuks today and none on food (except for that ages-ago pho) so I was getting pretty cranky, but the palace was right there and maybe they had french fries inside.

They didn't, but they had some pretty cool buildings. When I bought the ticket, he gave me my change in the local currency. The careful reader will recall everything else uses/takes US dollars here, but they have a money of their own. They use it instead of coins.

So, if something costs $3.50, you give them a five and get back a one and a bunch of colored lottery tickets.

Palace was cool, a sprawling complex of large, pretty buildings all with the special roof they have here. This sort of gabled, spikey, Khmer roof. It's nice but gets pretty similar after a while. It had been a very long day, and I took a few pics.

I yelled at a Japanese woman who was standing in everyone's shot and decided it meant I should get something to eat.

Outside the palace, a tall tout was loudly asking everyone if they needed a tuk tuk. It was like, "Oh, thank god you're here. No one would EVER get a tuk tuk without you. It's so hard to find a ride in this town."

I found a guy and asked him to take me home. His tuk tuk was filthy. It... suck sucked.

We passed some actual street art on the way, and I beat on his back and asked him to pull over. He did and expressed amazement that someone would paint on the wall and that someone else would take a picture of it.

That was very sweet to me as was the ideas of the other drivers (so many drivers this day!) that the art in my pic was probably in the museum.

Climbed back up those screwy stairs, soaking wet, shaky and exhausted. What a day! TWO genocide museums, temples, palaces, markets! The water was back on, so I took a shower. Then I was too tired to climb over that lobby motorcycle again, so I just ate ramen noodles and went to bed.

The club next door fired up and Taylor Swift conveyed me to sleep on her disco tuk tuk.