Phnom Penh Adventures Day 3: aka Where is Elliot?

Day 3

Here is Elliot's Day 3: Sick, sleep, sick. He spent the entire day in the hotel room and couldn't even make it downstairs to get a dvd or anything. Poor Elliot. :( Everyone else seemed to have a great day...

Everyone else's Day 3: We were all pretty tired so we decided to keep the day pretty easy, but Helen was getting antsy after not having done anything all morning and decided to make a trip to one of the markets we hadn't visited yet. Caya, Liza, Sean, and Sharon decided to go with her, agreeing that whatever happened we would meet back at the hotel to get lunch and then go tour the Royal Palace at 2.

The market we went to was for people who actually live in the city rather than tourists. No one tried to get our attention or attempted to get us to buy anything, it was very relaxed in the sense that it was an every-day sort of thing, but at the same time crazy busy as it was a three-story indoor market. There were rows and rows of shoes in little mannequin feet (very creepy), ailes of fabric, stalls of western-ish clothes by the hundreds, sections for school supplies, hair accessories, technology, hardware, and even a whole area filled with hairdressers. The smell, however, of the food sections with all of the fish was overwhelming and we decided to leave Helen to go back to the Russian Market. It was a bit difficult communicating to the tuktuk driver where we wanted to go but actually being at the market once we got there was great.

We met back up with Helen at the hotel and went to Friends (Mith samalanh, in Khmer) with Scott for lunch. The restaurant is part of a program working to help kids on the streets of Phnom Penh, taking care of them and helping train them for the work force. It's a sort of training project for them, working the restaurant, and is a great way for toursits to help out a little bit. The food was great and we had a sort-of class discussion on politics and the like while we ate.

From there Scott left us and we moved on to visit the Royal Palace. We'd walked past it plenty of times but had never actually gone inside. It was absolutely beautiful, with separate gates for the public, the king (called the victory gate), the dead (called the ghost gate, for the royalty when they die, leaving the palace), religious purposes, and another, now kept locked, called the killing gate that in the past was used to remove servants who did something wrong to be killed. Not all of it is available for the public to see, obviously, but we got a tour of some of the buildings, including the Silver Pagoda (called the Temple of the Emerald Buddha to Cambodians) which featured an entirely silver-tiled floor and a huge green buddha statue made out of jade and I think covered in emerald, the elephant houses (where the king's elephants were kept. Now he has a BMW. Yeah, we asked. We pretended to be filming an episode of cribs, Cambodian-style.), and the building that functions as the king'd dressing room. There were exhibits of the coronation clothes for the king and queen (absolutely gorgeous, gold-threaded robes), the outfits of the palace staff (different colors for every day of the week), and different artifacts like jewlery, buddha statues, etc. There was even a building, unfortunately under construction, that was sent over in pieces to be built by Napoleon the Third. Crazy, right? Out tour guide was telling us about the statues around some of the buildings at the spot where the walls met the roof "These statues are there to protect the building, oh and there's a monkey." Literally, there was a monkey on the scaffolding on the building right next to it. We found out later they're everywhere and they love mango.

For dinner we went to the jungle. Not really, but it felt like it. It was actually a Khmer/Thai place with the front covered in beautiful plants of all different kinds. The inside was great as well, we ended up on the balcony of the second floor, shoes left at the door, sitting on cushions on the floor overlooking the busy street below. The food was some of the best yet, including some great pad see-ew, ginger stir-fry, mint-smoothie, fish cakes, complete with Elliot attempting to join us but lying on the floor being spooned ice with a plate of rice on his chest. Oh dear.

From there we went to a DVD store next to our hotel and bought The Killing Fields (for $1,50. We plan on getting many more.) and watched it up in our room. It was sobering and intense, despite the slighty ridiculous soundtrack.