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In the café next door, the TV screen was showing an Indian musical. To the right of the café was the “John Lennon Bar & Hair Dress”.
On the day of my visit the King was not in his residence; he had gone to China to see his ailing father, Prince Sihanouk. Now 84, Sihanouk has been suffering from cancer for the last thirty years and, hence, in 2004, abdicated in favor of the current King, Prince Norodom Sihamoni.
In contrast, the current King’s coronation photograph, also on display in the Palace, shows him as almost overshadowed by the man standing sternly behind him, Prime Minister Hun Sen.
This columned pavilion is without walls “so that the moonlight can shine completely inside.” On the day we were there, four musicians were playing traditional Cambodian music.
Alongside the Mosque was a guest house. It was called “Same Same But Different” and offered rooms at “$2/$3/$4” with Cable TV.
There was one more picture of note on the prison wall, that of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, the former commandant of Tuol Sleng prison. Duch had been a school teacher himself. After the demise of the Khmer Rouge regime, he disappeared in 1979.
The spirit house in front of the City Hall was a reminder of the continuing influence of pre-Buddhist religions. The women in head scarves at a café on the side street were Muslim.
“If you don’t follow the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire,” warned another. The third said: “While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.”
Phnom Penh is located at a four-way water intersection. Called Four Faces (chattomukh), this is where the upper Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers merge and split into the Basak River and the lower Mekong flowing to the South China Sea.
Our guide at the National Museum of Cambodia began her introduction by saying that “the Khmer civilization is the oldest in South East Asia, as it dates back to the first century.”
Formerly a high school, Tuol Sleng was where the Khmer Rouge regime, which ruled from 1975 to 1979, detained and interrogated at least 14,000 people.
Soon I found myself more interested in why the Cambodian people followed their more contemporary rulers. This is when we were visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
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