What is it all about?: Life becomes so much better when you remove all negative people from it.

Phnom penh, 30.10.2015

A statement many of us would agree on. Knowing it is a quote from Pol Pot, a leader of Khmer Rouge that was rouling in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and killed approximately 25% of population in prisons and working camps, may be at milest seen as very weird way of sarcasm.
Our first touch of Cambodia, however, started a bit more cheerfuly. Already on a plane we met a Slovenian living for few years in Phnom Penh who equiped us with all the basic information needed for first day.
With its a bit caothic traffic ruled by tuk-tuk drivers and motorbikes the capital of Cambodia really is something new for a person who has never been in SE Asia. Hot and humid weather made us sewatin in no time, but welcoming and nice people made everything better soon. After checking in a basic but very low priced guesthouse Londgin house we went for a first walk full of smell, noise and a bit of adventerous crossings of the roads. Here size does matter! But anyways everything runs in its caothic kind of order and it seems that trafic runs quite smoothly.The food is nice too, Khmer amok was very nice introduction to Cambodian cusine. In the park in front of Silver pagoda many people gathered for the celebration of national holiday with a big fireworks - a nice view into ordinary peoples life who were eating and drinking on the grass with kids scraming and playing around - it really looks like they have a happy childhood full of play and laugh! After the diner it was not very difficult to go to sleep even if the heat in the room was quite intense.

Next day we started off to a nice sunny day and planned to see the Tuol Sleng museum. The whole experience is quite traumatic with the pictures and torturing equipment and prison cells on display. After the liberation from Khmer rouge forces there were only 7 survivors, 4 of them kids. Two of the survivors are still in the place every day talking to the visitors and selling their books. Quite sad that the victims of such a horror have to sell themselves every day to make for a living while majority of people responsible for the tragedy still walk around without any problems. Probably an uotopian state where everybody is the same really is uotopia.

After the hour of darkness we went with another tuk-tuk to silver pagoda. We tried our rusty negotiation skills and they got better, as we were able to lower the price quite a bit:)
Silver pagoda with king's palace is a buddhist temple in the center of the city with a nice arhitecture, cute rooftops and kich interior decorated with plastic flowers. While there a big group of monks came to visit the pagoda and you can see that developement did not skip them. Taking group photos and selfies with smartphones seemed to be their main ocupation:). It was quite funny looking at this bald guys, most of them really young, running around in orange dresses and every now and then taking out their iphones.

Going on trough streets with people ocasionaly waving and screaming:"Do you want tuk-tuk sir?", but in a very polite and not at all pushy way like in some arabic country. I have a feeling that inspite
their relatively bad situation they are happy. Everybody is smiling and when asked they want to help you.

Evening was reserved to find some of Khmers delicious cusine. Beef with ant sauce and aquatic plant on the street was a nice introduction in the insect world. I think our food is boring:)