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On our first night in Phnom Penh we ventured out to find somnething to eat and ran into a funny old man by the name of Mouly. Mouly began chatting with us and suggested some places to eat and then offered to walk with us there. A very friendly and talkative old man, in his 70s I think, we soon found out all about Mouly and his quest to find a job in the city. He spoke very good english and was looking for work with an NGO as there was no work in his hometown in the country. Mouly took us to a nice street cafe and even gave us his phone number, offering to take us to the museum or Royal Palace the next day.
We had extremely foolishly told Mouly the name of the hotel we were staying at and at 8am the next morning we were awoken by the hotel room phone, ringing several times. Half asleep and hardly in a mood to chat with the weird reception guys, we ignored the phone, wishing it to go away and let us sleep in peace. 10 minutes later came a knock at our door. We exchanged looks of terror and again decided to ignore the knock and pretend we weren't in. When the knocking continued for the next 5 minutes we began to wonder what the hell was going on so Tyler creeped up to the eyehole and peered through into the hall. it wa Mouly!!! As nice as Mouly had been the night before, we didn't really want to be stuck with this old man all day and have to akwardly shrug him off at some point in the day, so we stayed completely quiet and pretended we weren't there. Eventually Mouly left and when the coast was clear we snuck out to explore the city!
We stayed in Phnom Penh for about 4 or 5 days. Our first destination was the National Museum, which rather annoyingly ended up like most southeast asian museums, that is full of Buddha statues and relics. There was a few big ponds in the courtyard with heaps of Huge fish and we bought some little fish food pellets and fed the fish with a cute little French girl. We hung out a bit on the river, but it was being redeveloped when we were there so it didn't live up to it's full potential, although there was one day when an elephant came strolling down the road, that was rather entertaining!
A rather grim attraction in Phnom Penh is the S21 Genocide Museum. It's not really a museum but just an old building where alot of people were tortured and killed. The Khmer Rouge used this old school site as a prison for political and other prisoners and then tortured and killed heaps of them. Cheery huh?! The buildings have been left largely how they were found, with all the original beds (when they were lucky enough to have one) and torture equipment lying around.
As we went to book our next bus tickets we also had a quick peek at the very attractive Central Market building, an old french Art Deco building. Very cool. Yet very smelly too...
Phnom Penh isn't exacly bursting with things to do, but it's one of the more interesting Southeast Asian Cities. We soon jumped on a 7 hour bus and were soon in Siem Reap!
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