Sylvia's Journal

Before Prateek showed up I tried another new breakfast, this time something with tender beef in a spicy orange-brown sauce, served with French bread. There is a breakfast menu that says ‘Breakfast Menu’ in English but what follows is writtten in Khmer and Chinese. Aside from the indecipherable script there are also symbols after some of the menu items that I’m curious about, like a perching bird and a rose. They are like the pictures of chili peppers that indicate spicyness (one, two or three) but I can’t figure out what birds and roses stand for. I have started to ask the waiter to bring me something I haven’t had yet. After breakfast I worked for a few hours on stuff that has nothing to do with Cambodia but needed to get off my to do list.

Prateek had hired his tuk tuk driver for the day, at the whopping cost of 15 dollars, to take us to places of interest. We started with a visit to the central market, a series of long giant corridors that end at a cavernous central plaza where sun glasses and watches are sold. Like any market in the world similar wares can we found together and much of the stuff comes from China. One section that was really different from markets like this in Africa is the place where food is sold; there was much I did not know or even recognized as food: a basket of enormous crickets, all sorts of pickled and dried foods, and fruits and vegetables I have never seen in my life.

Prateek thought I’d be eating a lot of Khmer food in the coming weeks and took me to sample PP’s best Italian food. I chose a dish Axel prepares a lot at home (spaghetti carbonara) to see how it compared to the real thing (quite well!). We ended the meal with a heavenly espresso.

He took me to shopping places because that is what foreigners are supposed to do. I was not a great customer because I am still planning to travel back with hand luggage only. I did indulge in my one weakness: scarves. There are millions of scarves on display everywhere. They are most beautiful when displayed together, their colors radiant and dazzling. I did decline to have shoes made from scratch or buy rip-off brand name luggage, although if I continue like this I will need to buy another piece of luggage.

After lunch we went to see the Tuol Sleng museum which left both of us in a contemplative mood. I kept thinking how the terror regime was alive and well at the time that Axel and I traveled along the hippy trail eastwards, blissfully ignorant of the atrocities happening just a little bit further east.

A special exhibit showed photos made by a Swedish political activist who traveled to Cambodia as a 29 year old, as part of a Swedish delegation that was to tell the world all was well in Cambodia. His photos had captions that represented his comments and thoughts at the time (1977) and reflections from today, with the hindsight that history has provided him. At the end of the exhibit, in a personal letter to the people of Cambodia, he asks for forgiveness; a mea culpa of sorts for his gullibility and stupidity of letting himself be used by Pol Pot’s propaganda machine.

I am roughtly the same age as this Swedish gentleman. I remember those heady days in Western and Northern Europe when we all got Mao’s red booklet, sang the ‘Internationale’ (greatly irritating our parents) and thought this socialism thing was rather cool. Some of us also thought that a more egalitarian society was actually in the making in this part of the world, as this Swede did. Now I think these were simply reactions to our parents’ wish for peace and a quiet bourgeois life after the world war years of hardship and terror. He writes how he has now settled down into a peaceful and bourgeois life. The museum shows pictures of the thousands and thousands of people who did not.

After our visit to the museum I kept looking at people in a different light and wondered what their stories were and how many are still suffering from the consequences of the nightmare and unable to function well. As for the young people, would they also grow up getting tired of their parents talking about the Pol Pot days, as I was about the war in Europe? About people who had been good and others who had been bad?

The rest of the day we alternated between shopping streets and eating streets (or streets where you could do both), drinking fruit smoothies and beers on rooftop restaurants, and supporting good causes by buying their stuff. We capped everything off with a wonderful Vietnamese seafood soup and fresh springrolls. And all during the day we talked about a thousand things.