The good, the bad and the ugly - Phnom Penh

Sa bai dee!! Life has been more exciting this past week and a half - including a swanky Australia Day party, and a trip to Phnom Penh - so I'm coming to write sooner :-)
Last Tuesday night was the party (not Australia Day, but anyway!!), held at the ambassador's residence - I don't know what I was expecting, but whatever it was the party surpassed it by a long way :-) There were fairy lights all over the house, a red carpet when you arrived, hundreds of bunches of flowers as presents for the ambassador, a jazz band flown from Australia, free flowing food and wine, a parting gift of a bottle of wine for everyone who attended....and half of Laos was there, it seemed. I soaked it up, because I know that I'll never get to experience anything like it again!!
Then it was only 2 days until Chris and I left for Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. I have to say I was itching to get away from Vientiane - I needed to have a little adventure :-) We arrived just before lunch - straight away I knew I was in another psychotic, crazy SE Asian city (I get the feeling that Vientiane is just about the only place in SE Asia that isn't completely chaotic!) People were doing whatever they wanted on the road - for one example, I saw someone breastfeeding their baby on the back of a motorbike on the way to the hotel.
We booked into a lovely hotel recommended by my boss - with a pool! How exciting! It was just around the corner from the Independence Monument (which is far more attractive than Vientiane's version of the same thing). Chris and I wandered over to the Royal Palace and the Silver Pagoda in the afternoon, which has a lot of seriously jewelled Buddhas, and an amazing, crumbling mural all around the walls of its courtyard. After that it was off to the National Museum to look at ancient Khmer sculptures (which just whetted my appetite for Angkor Wat in April!) followed by a wander along the riverside at sunset, and dinner at a great tapas restaurant.
This is where I first started to see apparent poverty - I was approached by many beggars, including one guy on a stretcher who was being wheeled around by a friend. There was also one occasion where Chris and I were approached by two beggars at once, one of whom we had given money to not very long before. We went to give them both money, but didn't have enough to give both of them the same amount. The one who gave money to previously didn't get as much, so he rejected our money and then followed us down the street asking for more money, before swearing at us as we crossed the street. It was very confronting - I've never seen anything like it.
We didn't expect Saturday to be any easier, because we were going to delve into Cambodia's Khmer Rouge years (1975-1979). In the morning we headed to Tuol Sleng Museum, which was a high school that Pol Pot turned into a prison and torture centre. It was bone-chilling - walking through rooms where people were tortured, seeing photos of all the victims (20,000 people were detained here, and only 7 survived), seeing the cells where the victims were held. Its amazing that these things have happened in our lifetime - and are still happening all over the world.
If this wasn't enough, in the afternoon we headed to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, about half an hour outside town. This was where all the prisoners from Tuol Sleng were brought to be executed, and then buried in mass graves. There is a massive stupa, which is stacked to the roof with 8000 exhumed skulls. The site is then full of holes - maybe what you'd imagine a bomb site to look like, but they are actually exhumed mass graves. Half of the graves at the site have not even been exhumed.
To cheer ourselves up, we headed back to the hotel and went for a swim in the pool (it was pretty warm in Phnom Penh, as opposed to Vientiane, which was cold and miserable all the weekend thanks to a bit of Chinese style weather). Our Lao AYAD friends Hugh and Katherine, who were also holidaying in Phnom Penh, met us there and we headed out for a yummy Lebanese dinner (something we don't have in Vientiane!)
The next morning, we went shopping - I was determined to buy our flatmate Sam a Cambodian present, as it was his birthday the next day. We ended up buying him a wooden dagger (plus some presents for me...) after what seemed like hours of wandering through silk shop after silk shop. Lunch was at a lovely cafe overlooking the river, and then we spent some time wandering around Wat Phnom (which is on the hill where Phnom Penh gets its name - it means 'hill of Penh' - Penh being the lady who allegedly discovered the temple). We left in the afternoon - by that point I was happy to leave, since I was getting sick of being pestered by tuk-tuk and moto drivers on every street corner who pounce on every white person they see (motos are literally some guy on a motorbike, who offers for you to jump on the back...no thanks!)
Work is going ok, although I am perpetually confused about how to get my project done. I am constantly amused by the people streaming in and out of Sunlabob - this week we had another German intern join us, and this afternoon a consultant for the Finnish government came in offering millions of dollars in grants....
Every week I feel more and more settled here in Vientiane - I am glad that I was sent to this quiet city after visiting places like Phnom Penh (its like Dungog, but with half a million Laotians instead!) One of the things I enjoy most is driving around on my pink Honda SuperCub scooter - it likes to stop randomly while I'm sitting at traffic lights, and starts to shake violently if I try to go above 40k/h, but I really love the sense of freedom - I'm no longer scared of riding on motorbikes :-) However I'm sure I'm getting into some bad driving habits.....
I'll be back again soon, hopefully with some more stories :-)
Sok dee,
Susan