I liked the city a lot and wished I could have stayed longer. For sightseeing, it can be exhausted pretty quickly and I would get bored before long, but as a place to live and work, it compared favorably in some ways to Saigon, at least in the very brief time I had to form an impression. With work to keep me busy, I think it would be an interesting place to spend some time. Some of the differences are just because it is smaller than Saigon, like Chicago has a saner pace and more elbow room than New York. But I guess it also compares favorably to some smaller cities in Vietnam I've been to. It had an openness to it that's hard to put my finger on. (In a very important way, the country is measurably more open, being a multi-party state.)
The poverty there is appalling even compared to what we're used to seeing in Vietnam, and on the bus ride back, Saigon, a city that usually seems to me to be pretty down-at-the-heels, appeared positively thriving from the fresh perspective of a couple of days in Cambodia. Still, the little I saw of Cambodia gave me the impression that it was poised for a leap forward. I saw so little of it that I should probably keep my mouth shut and not try to form conclusions, but to give just one example, I was struck by the apparent contradiction of a country that could afford to provide so little education but where the level of foreign-language ability seemed to surpass Vietnam's. Or, despite the poverty, how it was still possible to buy certain creature comforts that aren't available at any price in Vietnam. Books, for example.
An anecdote to illustrate. I stopped at a literacy program called Open Book on Street 240 and chatted awhile with the French woman who operates it. It's a kind of book bank and drop-in tutoring center for children, and it's filled with used and donated books -- the kind of stuff I've been collecting since my last trip to Vietnam and struggling without success to get here since the customs laws forbid me shipping them to Vietnam. Then she showed me another part of her enterprise -- the children's books that she publishes. They are translations from English or French into Khmer or vice versa of existing children's books she finds useful for the instructional programs. She sells them to other schools, using the proceeds to help distribute more books for free. She has published about 20 titles this way in the last few years.
When I saw them I thought back to a related experience I had in Vietnam on my last trip when I became acquainted with the owner of an art gallery. She publishes catalogs of the shows they put on, but that has been a far from easy experience. She has to navigate a labyrinth of bureaucracy, paying tributes along the way to get all the stamps and approvals and tolerating revisions to her copy so that every artwork finally ends up with the same bland descriptions. In Vietnam, every artwork as an illustration of the spirit of the people resisting the foreign aggressor. This is after she has already done her best to self-censor at the beginning of the process. At the literacy program in Phnom Penh, I asked how she was able to get her books published. She just did it, she said. She didn't need anyone's approval.
Well, that was my big learning experience, and this entry was supposed to be about the sight seeing. I went to all the temples and museums the guidebooks recommend and loved them. I hung out with the religious students at the temples who wanted to practice their English conversation for awhile. We went to the night market where the shopaholic came out in Tuan. I had breakfast every morning on a rooftop cafe overlooking the neighborhood Wat and watched the monks parade out in their orange robes with their rice bowls to beg for their daily food. I wandered the streets for hours as I do in every city I visit, buying innumerable bottles of water and making myself a spectacle on odd streets where tourists don't have any business. I loved riding in the tuk-tuks. I walked along the riverfront park as the moon rose and watched the population congregating for exercise and prayer and ice cream. I avoided the sites commemorating the genocide, but it seemed you could feel the loss and mourning in the air still. It reminded me of the raw-nerve feel of New York City about two years after 9/11 -- the occasional sense without it being said aloud that something terrible happened here. It felt like everyone was under age 30, as if everyone had been conceived in grief.
I tried as much of the local food as I could, but it was hard to get out of the tourist rut, and we had a lot of crummy food, too. I didn't learn a word of Khmer. I didn't see anything outside the capital except from the window of our bus on the highway to the border crossing. I'm reminded again of how fortunate we've been in Vietnam to have local connections who help us get out and see things that that foreigners usually don't. I wish it could always be that way, but our initial experience in Cambodia was necessarily much more limited. I hope I can go back sometime.
-Robert
