Hello everyone,
In the last few days, Ben and I went out exploring a little more. First, we visited the Temple Tonle Bati, which is a little ways out of town. We were able to reserve a driver with a car that included even massage seats. The temple actually has two temples, a modern contemporary one and the ruins of one that was built back in 1181. I love seeing the ruins but of course we went through the newer one too.
At the newer one, there were some kids playing around and three of them started following me and speaking Khmer. I could not catch everything they were saying but they were pointing at different things. They showed me how I should bow down in front of some of the statues, they counted 1, 2, 3 in English and I showed them how I could count in Khmer. They seemed a bit surprised. Later I was also able to ask if they were siblings in Khmer and they understood me. Of course they wanted some money at the end, and we gave them some of the local money we had in our wallets. It ended up being about $1 total. But they were happy.
After seeing the temples, we drove to a Pagoda (Monastery) where they also have their “cemeteries”, however, those are more for the looks since they usually cremate their dead. The buildings they build for their dead loved ones are called stupas and they are very colorful. It was pretty interesting to see it all.
Our second outing was a much more difficult one and we don’t have a lot of pictures from it. We went to the Killing Fields and the Genocide Museum. Cambodia has a tragic history from the late 1970s. This was a spill over from the Vietnam War and part of the Communist wave that was going through the world. Brazil was under and dictatorship at the exact same time. It is hard to read about this genocide because it happened during our lifetime and there are still survivors around. The way they killed children, men and women was horrific. We took the audio option during the visit and that was incredible.
The audio was done by a survivor so it was very powerful. The Killing Fields is actually fairly peaceful and quiet place. You can see a lot of the bones from the people that were killed there. This was just one of them, there are several throughout the country but many are not open to the public because they are surrounded by land mines. It is so sad that human beings can do this to other human beings.
The Genocide Museum is actually an old high school that had been used as a prison and place for torture during the regime. As a teacher, that was hard to see, classrooms that had been transformed into torture rooms. It was a hard thing to visit but necessary to learn more about the place we now call home.
I have a surprise to tell everyone on my next post, so stay tuned… It is something I have been working on during this ‘vacation’.
Thank you for reading,
