Day 81 - Thurs Jan 22 - National Museum and Royal Palace

Today we spend the hottest part of the day in the National Museum - it's shady, there are fans and we can drop off our backpacks at the front door for a few hours. After yesterday's heat and walking I feel like I'm at a spa (though we do the same amount of walking as yesterday: about 6 and a half hours by the end of the day).

It may sound strange, but there's something quirky-charming about a place where a museum has to remind guests to "Please deposit all bags, cameras and weapons at the front counter." ("But I'm trying to expose my handgun and rifle to more culture...") Raisins and bottled water don't seem to be on their hit list so we carry these around as a snack. The windows are open and have no glass, so there's a really nice breeze.

Later, I can't remember much about the statues but I remember a whole lot about which windows and doorways provided the best breezes.

After a few hours, we leave the museum, finish up another litre of water (about 4 in total by the end of the day) and drop by Wat Ounalom just a few blocks away.

During our walk around the grounds we meet an old man that seems to be the wat-keeper and who opens up the shrine for us with his keys.  

We kneel on the floor, feet pointing away from the Buddha and our host, as is polite.  We aren't naturals at this uncomfortable kneeling position, especially on stone floors, but we manage to keep it up during our short visit.  The man turns on the neon lights around Buddha's head and they flicker slightly out of time with the tune he starts on the CD player which is simple and cheerful, like a Cambodian version of "It's a Small World."  

He speaks no English, we speak no Khmer, so we make gestures to let him know the shrine is beautiful and that we'll return later with a donation for Buddha since we have no small bills.  He says what sounds like a little prayer and flicks jasmine water on our heads, pours a little in our hands, and gestures that we should rub it on our faces.  The water is scented with fresh jasmine flowers - I find a few dried up petals stuck in Pierre's stubble later when we sit down to eat later.  

Our spot of choice to cool off and eat up before the Royal Palace is the Khmer Saravan restaurant (#16 Sothearos Street), which seems to be one of Phnom Penh's best kept secrets.  The guidebooks don't list it but it comes highly recommended by their former customers, who provide multi-lingual rave reviews that paper the walls.  (you can see some of them behind the man in the yellow shirt here) :

The reviews are in Swedish, Polish, French, Russian, Chinese, German, Greek, Portuguese and more.  We figure out the languages thanks to a mix of playing hey-what's-that-alphabet and reading the city names that the reviewers sometimes include under their signatures. We don't know what most of them say, but they're peppered with hearts, smiley faces and exclamation points next to the names of several of the dishes.  The reviews must be replaced frequently because the restaurant has been around quite awhile but none are dated much later than a month and a half ago.  The food is really excellent and well priced and we eat here many times during our days in Phnom Penh.

After lunch, we head back to Wat Ounalom to deliver the donation to Buddha (Pierre is our team rep and places it in his palm on our behalf)  and then we take a tour of the area around the wat which seems to be a mix of homes and monks' quarters.  There are a lot of orange and saffron sheets hung out to dry on clotheslines, and people sitting in the shade selling fruit and snacks.

Finally, we head over to the Grand Palace so Pierre can finally take some pictures of it - we've waited until late afternoon so that the light will be at its best. The grounds remind me a bit of the Palace in Bangkok, but smaller and slightly more run down. I wander from one puddle of shade to another while Pierre photographs everything.  The Palace itself is off-limits since the royal family lives there, but we see the throne hall and other buildings:

and the Silver Pagoda, which looks pretty similar from the outside:

Photography isn't allowed inside the Silver Pagoda, but the floor is covered with silver tiles, a few of which are cordoned off and left bare so we can admire them.  It must take a lot of work to keep the floor from constantly tarnishing in the Cambodian climate, especially during the wet season.  The rest of the tiles are protected by large woven rugs that allow us to walk around the pagoda without damaging the tiles.   We check out the standing, life-sized Buddha the pagoda is famous for (after its silver floor, of course) - the statue is made of gold and decorated with "9584 diamonds, the largest of which is ... 25 carats."  It's impressive but I can't help imagining Buddha seeing this statue of himself and saying "You know, that type of thing wasn't really my point at all..."  Still, very beautiful and impressive especially since these are some of the few things that survived the Khmer Rouge 70s unscathed - these were kept around as the regime's proof that they were not destroying all of Cambodia's treasures (just most of them). 

There are ponds, puddles and stupas just outside the pagoda: 

Slightly out of place on the grounds is this beautiful little iron house, closed to the public at the moment, which the guidebook says was "given to King Norodom by Napoleon III of France." 

We check out the detailing on the gates:

...and the Ramayana murals that line the outer walls of the Silver Pagoda grounds.  These are similar to the ones that we saw on the Bangkok palace grounds but they've had a rougher time of it, probably suffering a bit of defacement during the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 70s as well as general neglect and exposure to the elements.  

We catch a trippy Buddha shot on our way out of the grounds:

photo credits:  P, P, P, P, D, P, D,  P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, P, D, D, D

Day 80 - Wed, Jan 21 - Foot tour of the 'Penh

Today is really hot - humid, sunny, blue sky, at least 38 degrees in the shade and there's no real breeze to cool things off. The heavy traffic and crowds of people only make things hotter. Today is the day we have scheduled a self-guided walking tour around part of the city - it's not our first day doing hours of walking, but it's definitely the hottest.

We stop by Wat Phnom towards the north of town, which is hot and humid but not too crowded. A scruffy group of five kids, ranging in age from 2 to 6 years old, have dibs on the place and they come up to us, hands out. We're still not sure how to navigate the requests for money here - there isn't enough money for everyone, but how do you give to just one of the hands and not to everyone else standing in front of you? Every one who asks needs it just as badly as the others. In my bag we have fruit bought at the market earlier today and we hand out 5 bananas, one per child, and everyone seems happy with that.

They stay outside when we take off our shoes to walk around inside the main temple - it's shady and cluttered with statues of Buddha and offerings of fruit. From inside we can hear and see the kids outside wrestling with each other near the door - I don't know what they're saying but they're behaving like siblings fighting for the right to do a particular something they think is important. Eventually, they get bored and by the time we leave they've wandered off to find other tourists. They've organized all the shoes by the door into two neat rows.

We leave the wat and follow the walking tour's suggested route, but in fast-forward.

"There's the train station." We look across 4 lanes of city traffic at the sunnier side of the street, where the station is.
"Neat. Want to stop?"
"Too hot." We keep walking.

Hot is the theme of the day. It's our response to everything: 'How's it going?' 'It's hot' 'Want a drink?' 'Yeah, it's hot'. It's also the deciding factor in whether or not we stop at something along our route. Sun bad, shade good.

This line of thinking is what makes our stop at the Center Market a bit longer than it might have been otherwise. Neither of us is too into shopping at the moment - we still have too-vivid memories of donating and/or packing up and storing all the stuff that we already own back in October. We wander a bit, stop for a quick lunch and then wander some more. The Center Market is in a old art-deco style building with a high domed roof:



The building is high packed full of stalls, and there's lots of activity. A woman walks by with a tray of roasted peanuts balanced on her head. Another woman in a seller's stall stirs the coals in the hollow metal iron that she uses to press clothes. A toddler sleeps in an empty stall, wrapped in a green hammock to keep away the flies that wander from bolts of cloth to mangoes to water glasses and back again. The south wall is lined with seamstresses whose feet pump iron pedals to work the machine needles.

A few men walk around the aisles with trays of books suspended from their necks like old-time cigarette girls. They're selling postcards and bootlegged books - the men who do this particular job in Phnom Penh are all amputees and they gesture to you with their wrists and walk around on double knee-height prostheses. We meet these men at the entrances of all the tourist sites around the city and the placards around their necks explain that this is their way to earn money without begging.

The stalls inside are orderly and laid out in right angles, but the stalls that circle the exterior of the building spread out in messy concentric circles. We don't spend too much time wandering there since it's warmer though shady thanks to the tarps and corrugated sheets of metal that make up the roof. Also, we're hoping to make it to either the National Museum or Royal Palace today so we head out into the sun.

All of the tourist sites that require tickets close at 5:00, and when we arrive at the museum not only is it too close to closing time to be worth our while, but the front gate doesn't have enough change to break our smallest bill. We resign ourselves to the fact that, for the second day in a row, we haven't made it to the National Museum/Royal Palace, so we'll try again tomorrow.

The view of the Royal Palace from outside the gate:


The pale yellow outer walls of the Royal Palace area gathering place for kids selling cold drinks and books to tourists and people asking for change.



Most of the buildings we see are a similar shade of yellow. It shows up on restored buildings...


...and on rundown buildings waiting their turn:


Outside the gate, we have a Tourist Moment followed by a Cambodia Moment.

Tourist Moments are easy to spot - the first few steps outside our hostel are always made of these. The tuk-tuk drivers (or tuk-touts, as we like to call them) are ready the second you emerge. "Hello friend where you go? Tuk tuk today?" Friendly but persistent and they're almost everywhere. The first tuk-tout of the day is treated to a "no thanks, we're walking, but thank you" from Pierre (so polite). This devolves into no-eye-contact/head shake/friendly wave within the first 100 metres or 10 offers, whichever comes first. Tourist Moments involve an exchange for money - if you're about to spend money, their smile stays. Otherwise it fades, you're invisible and they're on the hunt for the next person. We don't yet know the Cambodian phrase for hello because no one says it. Our day is filled with hello hello hello.

We run the usual gauntlet of tuk-touts on Samdech Sothearos Blvd, and turn onto a pedestrian-only side street along the north wall of the Grand Palace. Rows of tall old trees line both sides of the street.


The trees have been pruned repeatedly over the years so that the leaves are only in bushes at the top, about 20 feet up. We notice a small crowd of people gathered in a half circle a few metres back from the base of one of the trees - they're talking and laughing and squatting down around small piles of branches, gathering something in bags. We hear a chainsaw up above and the crowd lets out a sound like they're watching fireworks. Pierre and I look over just in time to one of the branches fall to the ground. Apparently it's tree-pruning day outside the Palace, and the branches are full of tamarind pods.

As soon as the branch hits the ground, a young man in a wide khaki hat grabs the branch and runs with it, dragging it down the street away from the crowd. The adults laugh as a group of small kids shout and trundle after it like tin cans behind a car. The adults laugh together, then laugh with us. No one says hello hello - they just laugh and continue to gather the long brown tamarind pods from the fallen branches. The branch down the street stops eventually stops moving and the kids set to work stripping pods for their plastic bags.

Tamarind is used a lot for cooking in south-east Asia, but we've never tried a green one. At first we assume that perhaps the people are bringing them home to pickle them or something but then we pass a group of teenage boys that are nibbling away on the pods and ask one of them: "Good?" He thinks a moment, translating to himself, then smiles, nods and takes another bite. We're curious but don't ask for one since it's so obviously a treat. A few moments later the boy rides by with his friends on their old upright one-speed bikes, metal baskets full of tamarind pods. The boy turns around and says "goodbye" and then they weave their way into traffic. Goodbye is so much more personal than hello.

We head back to the room and drink a few litres of water before bed.

photo credits: P, P, P, D, P, P, D, P

Day 79 - Tue Jan 20 - The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21)

The genocide museum is in the middle of a busy neighbourhood - we follow our map down the hot streets, crowded with mussel carts and fruit vendors and weave between students in school uniforms riding by, two or three often sharing one rusty bike.

Laundry hangs from the apartments nearby, often sharing the small shaded balcony with the small spirit houses so common across south-east Asia – they are as small as a birdhouse, and set with offerings for ancestors and those who might have lived on a particular piece of land in the past. The idea is that the spirits need a home and food and the spirit houses answer this need.

The spirits can feast as much as they like on the offerings – the plates of fruit, drink boxes with bendy straws, open bottles with drinking straws, flowers, bowls of rice. The fruit itself is not changed by them – the owner can clear the food away later and discard it or consume it. Doing the latter breaks no rules. At night, they are sometimes lit with Christmas lights which shine in an air that, night or day, smells of incense, sewage, fruit, and car exhaust.

When we walk around the city, as we do today, I often find myself trying to guess who is a Before and who is an After: who was alive before the Khmer Rouge and who was born after. It’s hard to pick out many who seem like in-betweens – birth rates during the regime plummeted, and there’s a generation gap.

*    *    *    *    *    *

I don't know where to start with Tuol Sleng.

Tuol Sleng (sounds like tool slang) – also known as S-21 – shares Cambodia's history: Tuol Sleng was a school. Cambodia and Phnom Penh came under Khmer Rouge (k-mer roozh) control on 17 April 1975. Shortly afterward, the two million citizens of Phnom Penh had to evacuate on foot, and relocate to the countryside. Even if the city hadn't been emptied, the Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng school would have sat empty because the Khmer Rouge quickly abolished formal education. The Khmer Rouge set to work purifying the population of “undesireables” and completely restructuring society. People seem to unanimously agree that nothing good came of this time.

One wall of the museum includes a poem by a Cambodian man who lived through these years as a child and he lists all of the things that were abolished, which include:

“…No education…No currency…No begging. No giving….No public transportation…No social gatherings…No flirting. ..No marrying. ..No mercy…No forgiveness…No lullabies…No playing…No rest….”

The result of this restructuring was devastating.

“The Khmer Rouge left behind a vastly uneducated and unskilled society; a displaced, diasporic, and traumatized nation; a population of seventy percent women, many widowed from the regime; and a country riddled with landmines that even today continue to maim and kill. The Khmer Rouge shattered families an homes, destroyed financial, educational, religious, cultural and political institution and – perhaps most of all – annihilated trust.”

(Olivia Ataras and Sarah Jones Dickens)

Many books and movies cover what happened during the time of the Khmer Rouge. They talk about the families that were separated, of children sent to work camps, and the fear that permeated everything, always. One museum placard describes the country at that time as “Prison no wall” – an invisible structure, but very real to anyone who lived in it.
The Khmer Rouge named themselves after the Cambodian majority, with “Khmer” being the term used to describe the ethnic group that makes up about 90% of the population. It’s punishment targeted its own people as much as it did outsiders. An academic had to coin the new word “autogenocide” to describe how the Khmer Rouge murdered and starved several million fellow Khmers during the 3 years 8 months and 21 days that it was in power.

At the time of our visit, there has been no formal punishment those responsible for what took place during the Khmer Rouge regime.  (post script: The court proceedings for the people in power at that time have been in the works for years but on hold - they finally started shortly after we left.)

Tuol Sleng the prison played a big part in what the Khmer Rouge considered its “purification process” – ridding itself of all those who were not sufficiently loyal or supportive of their cause. Those who were targeted (17 000 or more over the history of the regime) were brought to Tuol Sleng, interrogated, then killed and disposed of. People were sent to Tuol Sleng for condemnation, not to be cleared of charges – only 12 prisoners are known to have survived. As often happens, the definition of which people fit the category of “undesirable” was ever-changing – vague enough to target almost all and miss no one, including those who may once have at one point been the accusers.

*    *    *    *    *    *

Many tuk-tuks that drive around the cities carry similar signs:  

Welcome to Phnom Penh City. Places of sight seeing:
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
Killing fields
Central Market
National Museum
Royal Palace
Wat Phnom
Shooting Range

Tragedy takes the top two spots, while culture only makes fourth and fifth (though it’s nice that it beats out the automatic weapon shooting range.)

Tuk-tuk drivers shout to passing tourists in friendly voices: “Tuol Sleng, lady? Killing fields, mister?" Every book vendor that approaches us sells the same 10 or 20 books covering a small range of topics: Cambodia guidebooks, the ancient Angkor temples, the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge regime. The vendors wouldn't carry them if they didn't sell.

Again and again we signs that Cambodia’s tourist industry revolves around trinkets, temples and tragedy. The close relationship between tourism and tragedy makes me uncomfortable.

As a “citizen of the world” I understand my visit as my duty to be a witness to what went on in this place and to take that knowledge and to do my part to prevent it from happening elsewhere in the present or future.  But as a tourist in Cambodia, I feel conflicted. When we visit these places, do we have the experience that is intended by the organizers? One study has suggested that a large proportion of the Cambodia still suffers post-traumatic stress disorder. How healing is all of this for them?

What does coming to visit these sad places really do for us or for anyone else? My lack of personal connection to the history of this country makes the line between being a witness and being a voyeur feel like an always shifting thing. I understand how critical it is to come here and acknowledge what happened, to make sure that history doesn’t silence the silenced any further but there's still a key element of that argument I haven’t figured out for myself.

Pierre and I don’t know exactly what we are here to do, but here we are.

A tourist guide that we pass on the grounds says to her group: “It is not a pleasant place, but it is worth seeing. They killed parents, children. They wiped out generations.”

*    *    *    *    *    *

The museum itself starts with a fence: cement and 6 feet high, made taller by an additional 5 or 6 feet of corrugated metal and barbed wire. The grounds consist of four buildings on three sides, labelled A through D, that form an angular U.

 
 

Inside at a visitor's booth we pay 2 $ US each as an entry fee. The brochure we receive with our tickets explains briefly the history of the museum and its purpose:

“If we all do not emerge the anger, do not remind this cruelty and inhumanity action, this stat will be fade way in our exhilaration.”

Lest we forget.

A code of conduct sign requests visitors to be solemn:

Please be silenced, do not make any noise or laugh.
Please sit in an appropriate manner.
Please be concentrated spiritually and physically in order to pay respect to the souls of victims who dies unjust at the place.

They realize this might slip the minds of tourists during the several hours they may spend in the museum, and so there are signs reminding guests above many of the doors.

The code of conduct for tourists sharply highlights the only other list of rules posted on the grounds, the rules that security agents passed onto the people they were interrogating. This includes such rules as “2…You are strictly prohibited to contest me... 4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect... 6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all….” As 9 and 10 explain, disobeying any rule leads to more lashes and electrocution.


Building A, which is on the far left of the grounds, was used for higher ranking prisoners. There are 5 rooms on each of the three floors.



Since the rooms were originally for schoolkids, the rooms are a clash of bright and dreary - the walls are a warm butter yellow made richer by the sunlight that comes in the windows, but this only highlights the grimmer details of the room.
 


Each room houses one of the original metal bed frames – sometimes with shackles and tools of torture on display – which were used to torture the higher ranking prisoners, with a 3.5 x 2.5 foot black and white blow up of the bodies that were discovered in the rooms once the city was liberated by the Vietnamese in 1979.
 



Blood still seems spattered on the ceilings several rooms.

Building B Houses an exhibit of headshots from the records kept by the Khmer Rouge of some of the prisoners that came in through the doors.


The headshots are staggering.  As with any photo, the viewer takes on over the photographer’s role, and the image is directed at you as if you yourself are taking it. The hate, anger, shock and fear that each person felt at that moment is now aimed at you. As the hundreds of photos progress through the rooms, the subjects become more and more gaunt, though always a kaleidoscope of faces – defiant, calm, dazed, betrayed. I can only bring myself to photograph one whose eyes are masked by water damage. The rest I leave alone.


Building C houses the individual and group cells - the ground floor has the brick cells and the top floor has the wood cells. There are doors drilled through each of the walls, allowing the guards to more easily patrol the blocks of cells.



Each of the 5 class rooms on the first floor have 11 cells per room…


…about 7 by 3 feet each. The wooden ones are smaller at 2.5 by 7 feet.



On the third floor of Building C, we pass an exhibit about the 1978 Swedish delegation that visited Cambodia during the height of the regime. One of the men who was a part of that delegation, Gunnar Bergstrom, has created the exhibit as a type of formal apology.

At the time, there were people who supported the Khmer Rouge because, as Bergstrom says, “in the Khmer Rouge we thought we saw a pure movement that took no orders from superpowers." As one of the people who took part in the delegation, Bergstrom narrates the photographs that resulted from the trip and explains how it was that the delegation was able to believe that everything was fine under the Khmer Rouge. He revisits his earlier opinion: “Abolishing money sounded at first like a bold, revolutionary step. But it was a kind of slavery. It chained people to their assignments, the only place they could get food.”

Photos from the 1978 trip line the walls with comments by Bergstrom that contrast his thoughts were at the time and his thoughts in hindsight. He structures his comments into categories: Thoughts of 1978. Forbidden thoughts of 1978. Thoughts today.

A picture of the royal palace says:

Thoughts of 1978:
We asked to see King Sihanouk, but that was one of the things we were denied.
Does Sihanouk deserve the treatment he's getting?
Thoughts today:
Sihanouk's treatment was a disgrace.
Forbidden thoughts of 1978:
This revolution is misunderstanding of Marxism, communism.

A picture of a boy in a factory says:
Thoughts of 1978:
(none)
Thoughts today:
This boy should be in school.

An open letter posted as part of the exhibit finishes with the following:

“For all those still appalled by my support of the Khmer Rouge at the time, and especially those who suffered personally under that regime, I can only say that I’m sorry and ask for your forgiveness.”

* * *

We notice how close this former prison is to the outside world. Through the paneless windows of the torture rooms, we hear the traffic as well as music from radios in neighbouring buildings. We can count the pieces of laundry hanging on a line just 20 metres away and smell food cooking in nearby kitchens. We could easily stick our heads out the window and speak to someone on their balcony.

"Couldn't everyone hear everything?" says P as we stand in one of the rooms and wonder.

However, at the time that S-21 was in operation the borders that separated it from the rest of the city were much wider and stretched out to cover several city blocks. In addition, Phnom Pehn was probably very nearly a ghost town after the army cleared the city of civilians. It was chosen for isolation; the high wall at that time would have further blocked the noise. Whatever escaped would probably have fallen on ears that were either unsympathetic (those in charge) or powerless (everyone else).

We notice how beautiful the light is in this terrible place. Hints of its former life as a school showing up in some places, elbowing its way through a dark past.



Some people have left flowers on the exhibits as they pass.
 


I take notes, Pierre takes photos. We read signs and talk in low voices. I feel no closer to any solution to my dilemma of being here and what we are to do while we’re here in this museum.

The museum sees this as a place of spirits. I may not feel it, but the country that I am in believes it and feels it and has worked this exhibit around it.

One sign describes how the museum itself has wrestled itself with the dilemma of the Tuol Sleng display. “How could a community convey countless instances of inhumanity while being culturally, religiously and individually sensitive?”

This is not discussed explicitly in many exhibits here, though a plaque by some skulls on display in building C touches on the topic. At one point, the plaque explains, many skulls were out on display but now the majority of the skulls are housed in a separate room. Only a few have been left in the main area in special display cases: “The skulls rest on identical pedestals built from slightly overlapping wooden slats. Spaces have been left between slats so that air can reach the skulls, thus allowing the spirits to come and go as they wish.”

According to popular Khmer belief, a person who hasn’t been given a proper burial will have to live on as a ghost, unable to find peace. Spirits bring to my mind a jumble of images patched together from folktales, urban legends and Hollywood movies. I imagine how these spirits would look moving around the place, staring at the strange and rudely dressed foreigners walking through their cells. Watching us eat and drink, feeling our incomprehension, and anger, and sadness, punctuated by the occasional joyful thought or trivial preoccupation that bubbles up before we quickly bury it again. It’s sad to imagine this place as their home. There is no spirit house on the grounds – I wonder what they eat. The museum is so packed with echoes of suffering and pain as well as the anger and grief that the visitors carry with them. I wonder if, in the Cambodian idea of spirits, the atmosphere of this home erases the rest of the humans they once were – their highs overtaken by their lows.

And, sadly, in the midst of all this, I am thirsty and hot and tired and hungry , so very human and so very distractible. It’s not about me, and yet there I am.

I’m annoyed with myself for awhile. Though I am focused on what’s in front of me, I feel as though too much of my focus is still split with what I am. I wonder what Cambodian spirits would think of that. Finally, I get exasperated and say in my head, as if I'm talking to someone: Fine, if you want my thirst, have it. If you want my hungry stomach, have that too.

And that triggers a thought that makes sense to me for the rest of the time we’re in the museum: this place is the spirit house and we are the fruit. It’s not about our “fruitness”, we are not here to be consumed – we are an offering. Bring what we are, offer what we have, hand everything over for the time being. Some things are lemons, others are plums.

Not really an answer to my questions but suddenly I feel much connected to the place. Every time I’m distracted by something, I think, Oh, you want that too? Ok, it’s your call. And I imagine handing it over to something passing by, something that tries on my feeling like a borrowed scarf or who passes through it like a fog. The distraction is still there, but is no longer mine and not about me and I can focus through it, like a background noise.

We spend 3.5 hours in the museum. We read everything and take away with us what we can.

Days 76 to 78 - Sat Jan 17 to Mon Jan 19 - HKK to BKK to PP

Our next few days have the repetitive rhythm of a nursery song.

In Huizhou we catch a bus
...that takes us to Hong Kong
...where we catch a plane that takes us to Bangkok
...where we take a taxi
...that takes us to our hostel
...where we take another taxi the next day back to the airport
...where we catch a plane that takes us to Phnom Penh
...where we catch a taxi that takes us to our hostel.

The airplane (with over night in Bangkok) was one of two ways we looked at getting to Cambodia. The cheaper version would have involved going through a border town called Poi Pet. I vetoed this. It's not a dangerous place, necessarily, but any description I've ever read of crossing the Thai border requires a couple of days and involves multiple stages (from bus to hostel to taxi to bus, etc) as well as a lot of scam dodging at each of those stages. Even a year off from work is not long enough for me to want to waste any of my time on a trip like that. Pierre is a little disappointed with our decision to fly since Poi Pet sounded interesting (cheaper) to him, but in the end the alternative ("You take the bus, I'll fly and we'll meet in Phnom Penh") wasn't very appealing.

We spend the first day wandering the city and getting used to the traffic and heat, figuring out what there is to see and where to find it.

Here's a random shot of a food cart in Bangkok:


photo credit: D

Update: Phnom Penh

I just wanted to post up a short message to say we arrived on Sunday night in Phnom Penh and have been checking the place out for the last day or so. We'll put up some posts and pictures once we've seen a bit more.

Update: wagons ho

Our bags are packed and we're heading to Hong Kong via bus this afternoon to catch a 6PM flight to Bangkok.  We have one night there near the airport and then on Sunday afternoon we catch a flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  The Cambodia leg of the tour is scheduled to last until February 15th when we'll work our way back to Huizhou via Hong Kong.  As always, I'll paste up notes as we go from place to place, depending on how easy it is to find Internet access.  

Onward!

Days 63 to 65 - Sun Dec 4 to Tue Dec 6 - A plague upon you, plagiarists

December/January is the end of the Chinese university semester, so most days Dre has a lot of free time to spend with us, in between private lessons and exams.  This year he's taught his third year students to write research essays in English and which leaves him with 160+ papers to mark before the final exam on December 8th.   Pierre and I are recruited for a few days to help out with some of the easier aspects of marking, such as format (proper margins? proper font and bibliography style?) and plagiarism patrol.

Every year in school, Canadian professors warn students that it's incredibly easy to spot plagiarism.  I sometimes get the impression that the faculty find plagiarism not so much unfair as insulting.  The general consensus among profs and TAs seems to be "Really, do they think we're that stupid?"  Now I better understand what they mean.   When you go from "Dickens is many years ago all fame writer..." to "Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches..." - well, you've got plagiarism.  Sometimes it's really that simple and obvious. (PS. That's an actual sentence "borrowed" by a student, courtesy of John Steinbeck.) 

Since the students are new to APA style referencing, the plagiarism in this semester's papers has to be judged on a curve.  Andre's general rule is this:

• if the text in question is not set off by quotations or indentation, but the text borrowed is listed in the bibliography and/or noted in brackets at the end of the quote, that isn't considered plagiarism on this assignment.

Otherwise, it's plagiarism.

A lot of the students have referenced their quotes with indenting, etc, so those essays are quickly added to the "to be marked" pile.  The ones with obvious or suspected plagiarism are put in the  "to be Googled" pile.  By the tenth time we have to head over to the computer to Google phrases, we start to get pretty annoyed.  

The signs of plagiarism are usually pretty obvious - drastic shift in the quality of writing, turns of phrases that Normal Mailer would be proud of, and so on - and with ESL students, the signs are even more clear.  Especially clear are any cultural references that aren't within the experience of your typical, atheist/Buddhist, never-been-abroad student.  A flawless paragraph of text that includes the phrase "As Allah has taught us..."?  Plagiarized.   References to lesser cultural institutions such as the 4-H club within a well-crafted sentence? Plagiariffic.

We find ourselves start saying thing like "You guys aren't going to like this one - proper use of the semi-colon." 

Plagiarists aside, we're all impressed with what these students have written and it's an interesting introduction into Chinese culture and thought, siphoned through the minds of Chinese university students.  Their writing includes a lot of interesting idioms  - we learn things like: the Chinese equivalent of "bad apple" (as in "one bad apple spoils the bunch") is "the dung of a mouse" (as in ""the dung of  mouse can destroy a pot of soup").

We also come across a saying about choosing your friends wisely: "Friends always will have an immeasurable impact on people.  Just as the saying goes, who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl."

Original thought and any effort to craft an original sentence get points for the students, even if their sentence results in an unfortunate punchline.  In the case of a female literary figure whose downfall is caused by premarital sex, we have the memorable: "...it was her honesty, care, braveness, and penetration that led to her tragedy."

Some skip the dictionary and work with what they know, such as:

        Exhibit A: "she refused to be babied"

        Translation via context:  She didn't want to get pregnant 

        Exhibit B: "Female are really made of water."  

        Translation via context: Girls cry a lot.

Some sentences prove that electronic translators, like Babelfish, are not always so useful:  this sentence, regarding some Australian holiday ritual, is mystifying in a way that only an electronic translator can be: "At holiday evenings people take the drinks to the forest to hold a picnic which called 'Pakistan do not occupy.' "

Babelfish does have its poetic moments, such as one student's discussion of the benefits that newly graduated teachers brought to the rural villages where they had taught: "Once section of time, they had woven riot color dream for the village children."   Not English, exactly, but beautiful - I love the idea of weaving a "riot color dream" for someone. 

A lot of the essays make us laugh, but in a respectful (though drink-spraying) kind of way. Myself, I find English blunderers charming.  These are my people.  I fully realize that they make the same caliber of mistakes that fumble out of my mouth when I speak other languages.

At one point, while we're trying to riddle our way through a few sentences, I say to the guys "You know, some of these papers are thrown together and full of plagiarism, but they're still  probably a lot better than some papers that North American profs have to mark.  It must be so depressing to get this kind of paper from a native English university student."   What a sobering thought - the three of us share a moment of silence for those profs and TAs as we continue to mark. 

Several of the students are very eloquent and, in addition to the funny bits, we read out some of the more impressive ones, like this mini-rant from Wayne regarding the study pressures on Chinese kids (title: "Crisis of Adolescents' Values Education"):

"In any era, children should be the people who are light-hearted and spend most of their time playing with friends.  However, children are the busiest, saddest and thorniest people.  What education gave children are: exams but not dreams, reciting but not singing, homework but not hankering, marks but not hopes, get up early and sleep late."

Days 48 to 76 - Sat Dec 20 to Sat Jan 17 - Livin' La Vida Huizhou

This short blog post is my way of fudging through our time in Huizhou.  I've decided to make this entry the great dot-dot-dot of blog posts for a few reasons:

a) I want to shorten the lag between the actual date as I write this (mid-January) and the date of the trip blog (still back in mid-December) so that I'm not too far behind while we're touring Cambodia.

b) We aren't really doing much in Huizhou (sounds like "hway-jo"; rhymes with "away go").  

In university, Christmas vacation was traditionally the time of year when I'd go home to mom and dad's for a visit.  In a good year (take home exams or full year course with no mid-term), I could manage 3 or 4 weeks at home between the end of classes and the start of the new semester.  Those weeks were always spent doing a mishmash of things, and usually included great visits with family and friends, lots of movies and books, home-cooked meals.  When the weeks were over, I could never figure out where all the weeks had gone but I knew I'd enjoyed almost every minute.  

That's the best comparison I can think to make for our 4 weeks in Huizhou.   We're spending a lot of time with Dre and his Chinese family, getting into the city, exercising, doing a bit of footwork for Pierre's work visa, catching and fighting off colds, watching episodes of "How I Met Your Mother", and so on.  It's not the way we plan to spend our next 6 months in China, but it's feels perfectly respectable for a winter holiday.  

Days 46 to 48 - Thurs Dec 18 to Sat Dec 20 - Hong Kong

Hong Kong is the first place where we've spent any length of time without a guidebook to guide us.  I wouldn't recommend visiting Hong Kong on a budget without a guidebook, especially if you can't read Chinese or speak Cantonese.  

I find that travelling without a guidebook leads to a lot of wandering around looking for decent, inexpensive meals.  This is fun in moderation, but can lead to long gaps between meals and snacks.  I don't do well without regular meals - when Pierre's hungry he handles it graciously, remaining polite and interactive.  I, on the other hand, have to shut down a few systems to keep things civil.  Until my blood sugar gets back to a normal level, I work hard to muster up a polite tone of voice to say things like "Can we maybe not talk until I'm fed?"  This isn't new to me - in every city and every country we always have to fumble around a bit before finding places to eat.  By the time we leave Hong Kong on Day 48 we've almost got the food thing figured out, so we're a little more prepped for upcoming visits.  (We'll need to drop into Hong Kong a few times over the next seven months to catch flights to other countries and for visa runs.)

The first two nights we stay at the Dragon Hostel, which is located in the Sincere House building on Argyle Street near Mong Kok station. In spite of the dodgy-sounding signs of some of it's neighbours ("Hourly Spanish Hotel- 70 HK$ one hour") it's an award winning hostel and in a decent, central neighbourhood.  

In Canada, Pierre tried to describe to me the quirks of the hostels in Hong Kong, but I didn't really understand.  Here's what I know after my trip to Hong Kong: a hostel's office may be located on the 9th floor, but it may also have blocks of rooms on multiple floors.  A hostel may have rooms on only one floor, but no one floor is dedicated to only one hostel.  From what we saw, the Sincere House building has many floors (let's say 16) and each floor is a mishmash of personal residences, hostels, businesses and whatever else someone decides to use their apartment space for.  

Since something got mixed up with our reservation, Dragon House has a room for us Day 45 (6th floor), a room for us on Day 46 (9th floor) but nothing on Day 47.  So, on that day we switch to another hostel that's conveniently located a few metres away from our Day 46 room, which in turn was located next to an apartment-slash-belly dancing studio.  

The main reason we're in Hong Kong is to get to China and this requires a tourist visa. Getting a visa for any country can be a hassle (especially without a guidebook to ease the way) and according to my Internet/news reading, Chinese tourist visas are still a bit tricky to get - this is a hangover from the tight restrictions initiated for the 2008 Olympics.  On top of this, it's Thursday morning before we start getting our paperwork together, it takes at least 24 hours to get a rush visa, and the visa office isn't open Saturdays.   We really don't want to stay in Hong Kong until Monday or Tuesday just to get a Chinese visa, so we cave in and pay Dragon Hostel to take care of the footwork for us.   Our tourist visas/passports return to us Friday afternoon without a hitch - it costs a couple hundred dollars for two double-entry visas but it's worth every penny.  I don't know if we would have had a chance to see much of the city otherwise.

I've been saying "Hong Kong" a lot but, technically, during this visit we never cross over to Hong Kong proper .  Our hostel is located in Kowloon, north of Hong Kong.  When we walk south to the pier and look across the water we can see Hong Kong.  Near dusk, Hong Kong looks like this (on the left): 

...and at night it looks like this:

During our next visit we plan to check out Hong Kong, but on this trip we've got our hands full with Kowloon. A tourist brochure we pick up at the airport recommends a few self-guided walking tours, which lead us to the bird market:

 

...the flower market (where the flowers are pretty typical so this is the only picture we have from the flower market):

...the goldfish market...

...and, eventually, a night market:

On Day 47, we wander around outside a bit before heading into the Harbour City shopping mall.  It's hard to describe a mall and make it sound different, but this one's really big -  two-million-square-feet big.  The mall has piers next to it to allow cruise ships to pull up and drop off passengers for a few hours of shopping and these cruise ships are dwarfed by the mall.

(Part of me says, "hey, the square footage of the West Edmonton is more than twice Harbour City's" but, really, I think that 2 million square feet is the point at which "really big" and "bigger" stop meaning much.  Super Big Gulp vs a case of pop...either way is still too big for one person to be drinking...)

We get disoriented wandering around the different wings of the mall before we escape to the street again, but the visit is not a loss - we find both a reasonably-priced restaurant with amazing food (Canton Deli) and a huge mostly-English bookstore.  I'm 90% sure we can find both of those stores again someday.  

Photo credits: P, P, P, P, P, P, D, P