One thing I will say about Phnom Penh before anything else is that its name is spelt really stupidly. Different places spell it differently. NO-one seems to have problems with the Phnom bit. It's the Penh bit that's weird. If I had more time on my internet account here I'd look it up on Wikipedia and find out how many entries with different spellings there are.
Anyway, Phnom Penh (I'm gonna put the 'h' at the end) is about shopping. Markets everywhere with great bargains and some good haggling for everyone. I love haggling. I think I've become pretty good at it, too. I'm not one of those ruthless, cut-throat hagglers who bargains for every precious cent. But I do have some pretty good tactics that I might share some time... but the bottom line is, if you're not happy to pay the price, don't.
After spending an hour and a half at the Russian Market (Psar Toul Tompoung, surprisingly named because it was once a market for selling Russian imports), we headed back to the hotel for a swim.
Now, let's get some perspective on this: an hour and a half at this market allowed us to see less than a quarter of it. For me, I probably only got to see about a sixth of it due to some time-consuming haggling, and waiting for someone to find a VCD with the song "I Miss You" by some dramatic Cambodian boy-singer on it. In the end, the closest I got was the song "Miss You Like Crazy" by some Cambodian boy singer who is not as attractive as the one I would have liked. But still, Khmer pop music is worth every cent you pay for it - which was 10,000Riel - ie ncents at all!!! So we left, thinking that Fiona 'Shop Shop' Donato might go to a different market to keep her addiction under control.
Meanwhile, King Kong and Slorry got dropped off at the Tuol Sleng Museum - once a secondary school, then an interrogation/torture centre for the Khmner Rouge in which at least 20,000 Khmer people were 'interrogated' and re-educated (that is Khmer Rouge for murdered) by way of the Killing Fields. Of this 20,000+, only 7 survived, with 3 of them still alive today. It's too disturbing to go into any further discussion on this topic. You've got to see it to believe it, as well.
Shop-Shop, Feslipity and Sopeepee (daughter of Mrs Pee-Pee) went for a swim, then we met for lunch, and only made it 100m around the corner from our hotel before asking Chomreun to stop at a chingehn restaurant (chingehn means delicious in Khmer). It was chingehn, and expensive-ish, too. Chomreun was stunned by the $4 price tag on the fried rice (considering he used to earn $40 per month as a teacher).
Afterwards, we visitied the extremely opulent Royal Palace. It's hard to understand how this place can be filled with gold, silver and all manner of amazing jewels, whilst there are thousands and thousands of homeless beggars on the streets, as well as hundreds of well-fed beggars with plenty of cash, but who can make more money preying on tourists than they can doing a menial job in the city...
We then checked out Wat Phnom - a small and very old temple on top of a little mound in the middle of the city. Phnom means mountain in Khmer - why they think this is Mountain temple, I have no idea - as it only sits about 10 metres about the levle of the rest of Phnom Penh... must be a more elaborate story in this somewhere...
After this, there was more shopping to be done, so we headed to Psar Tom Thmey, the lragest market in PP, but it was closing, so Shop-Shop had to spen more time in a supermarket stocking up on pressies.
My Internet time is about to run out, so I'd better stop or I'll lose all this blog.
Bye
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