The bricks were crumbling.

And it was hotter than hell out there.

This is the statue of a Buddha head that is stuck in a Bodhi tree, which is where Buddha found enlightenment.

The Buddha in the Bodhi tree:

There are a lot of Buddhas in Thailand.

Flags in Phnom Penh:

Palace in Thailand for the royal family in the early twentieth century:

Gateway to the inner palace, where men were not allowed:

Plumeria, my favorite flowers.

I have a very vivid memory of trying to write about these two places– Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek– the last time I was here.  I remember being unable to write anything, really. Even now, my feelings on the matter are complex and I don’t know that I can adequately express them, but I’ll start with some facts.

Tuol Sleng was once a school, but it was turned into a prison by the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1970s. Very few people made it out of Tuol Sleng, or S-21, alive.  Those who survived the torture were often carted out of the city to Choeung Ek in trucks, supplied to the Khmer Rouge by the Chinese. The Khmer Rouge executed these individuals at Choeung Ek, but bullets were expensive. Instead, people were decapitated with a machete or hatchet, or their skulls were bashed in with an axle or hoe, or their throats were slit with fronds from a sugar palm.  It was a slow, gruesome death. The bodies were dumped into mass graves and covered with chemicals like DDT to mask the stench.

Women and children were also killed at Choeung Ek (and held in Tuol Sleng) because the Khmer Rouge believed that killing the entire family was necessary. To pull up the grass, the revolutionary slogan went, one must pull up the roots as well. With no survivors, there would be no one to come looking for justice later.  The babies were often killed first, swung by the ankles. Their skulls were bashed against the trunk of a large tree, which is called the killing tree today.

The Khmer don’t pull many punches.

In the West, we seem to prefer our atrocities to be bleached and sanitized before we deal with them. We want the smell of death gone before we walk there, comforted in the knowledge that our presence will somehow stop atrocities like genocide or mass-murder from happening again. You get none of that comfort at Tuol Sleng or Cheoung Ek. At S-21, the rooms are left as they were when the Vietnamese liberated the city; you can walk around and touch and feel the reality of the place. It’s oppressive and hot.

There’s no attempt made to hide from the reality of what happened at Tuol Sleng; the curators, if one can call them that, do nothing to maintain the museum. It is left to the ravages of time.

I generally don’t feel like whipping my camera out in places like this, because nothing I can do can ever capture the atmosphere, and it feels a little wrong.

I find Tuol Sleng to be a… better?  Easier? place to visit than Choeung Ek, however. To get to the killing fields, you have to take a tuktuk about 15-20 minutes outside the city. The countryside is beautiful, all vivid green and bright red, even though it’s the dry season.

The surreal feeling of Choeung Ek is what sticks with me. It’s this feeling that where I’m standing should be hallowed ground, sacred, preserved forever in memory to the more than eight thousand people whose blood seeped into the soil. But it isn’t. Animals roam free across the mass graves, and solemn signs remind you that you should not pick up any fabric or bone remnants you see on the ground, as the caretakers of the killing fields come around on a weekly basis and preserve them.

It gives a sense of intransience to existence that is disturbing and unsettling, like all this trauma and death is easily forgotten and smoothed over, and life goes on, but this isn’t how it should be. More than eighty of the mass graves at Choeung Ek have been excavated, but the ground still spits up bone and fabric like spring flowers.

Most of the large bones have been gathered and preserved in a Buddhist memorial stupa that sits in the middle of the lawn.

Inside the stupa, you can see the skulls of victims. All of them seem to show evidence of severe trauma. It’s heartbreaking.

So not many pictures today, just a lot of words. More pictures and less words next time.

Then we went to the jungle of “Tomb Raider” fame, and I stumbled around in a feverish haze. I don’t actually remember taking any of these photos.

After this, I passed out for approximately 20 hours, and woke up ready to go on Day 3.  We went to Kampong Phluk and Banteay Srae. I have a million pictures of Banteay Srae, which is the coolest temple I’ve been to yet, I think, but the floating village is more interesting, so have a picture of a demon:

and a pediment:

Then I caught this guy napping instead of checking tickets:

And some Khmer kids playing in the lake by the temple:

Here is the floating village.

First, I got on a boat.

On a lake called Tonle Sap.  It’s a large lake in the middle of Cambodia.

We went through a flooded jungle where the trees are still alive. This took a while.  Finally, we got to the village and we had some really dramatic lighting, and I saw these kids:

He had the most serious face, it made me kind of

This is a floating restaurant.

This one is a family home.

These are also family homes. They keep pigs and other livestock in floating cages.

This girl was fishing for tiny, silver fish with a net.

Today, we took a bus (AKA death trap) to Phnom Penh from Siem Reap. I prefer Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, but my parents wanted to go to Tuol Sleng (the Khmer Rouge prison in Phnom Penh), which is not the most uplifting of trips. I will try to update about that experience tomorrow (sans pictures, because the last thing I wanted to do in there was poke around with a camera).

First, the sun came up.

Here are some monks.

There are a lot of doorways.

And the sun comes up again! (These are not in chronological order).

This monk was very nice, and completely ignored me while I took pictures of him.

I found more doorways in this temple.

The thing that amazes me most about this place is the amount of detail that you can find around every corner.  Like here:

and here:

and here:

This is the temple that most people see first. It’s considered one of the temples at the Angkor site that has the least historical significance. It’s falling apart, it’s old, and it’s absolutely amazing. It definitely puts the rest of Angkor in perspective.

There are only two places that reoccur in my dreams. The first is the bottom of the sea, looking up, while hammerhead sharks and other creepy sea-things swim above me, silhouetted by cloudy sunlight. The other place that reoccurs in my dreams is Angkor Wat. There’s a surreal sense of solitude that I get here that I don’t get anywhere else. It doesn’t matter who else is around– when I am at the Angkor sites, I am alone.

Strange, eh?

**Angkor Wat is the name of the one very famous temple with five towers.  The rest of the Angkor site has temples in varying states of ruin. We didn’t actually go to Angkor Wat until day 2.

Keeps things interesting.

Lately, I’ve been anxious.  Anxious about the future, about the present, about the past, about anything and everything in between.  I don’t know what I’m anxious about, and that’s making me more anxious: I’m swinging at windmills, but in my head, they seem like dragons.  I’m probably being fatalistic and overly analytical (I’m told that I’m wont to be that way) but that doesn’t alleviate the symptoms that I’m feeling right now.

I’m taking a class about writing a memoir, and it’s made me reflect a lot.  Reflection doesn’t help someone who is prone to hyper-reflective behavior. I feel like an anorexic that compulsively steps on the scale, making sure the numbers are going down every day except this is my FEELINGS we’re talking about here and oh God how can you make feelings go down or go away and I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore.  I swear I’m not normally this neurotic, it’s just a perfect storm of insanity in my life right now.

It probably has something to do with Japan, I think Japan is the source of all my problems recently.

I think my brain is vibrating.  What a strange feeling.

I’m tempted to make it into a metaphor for our time in China, but I’ll try to refrain.

We first became aware of The Rat when we got a pet turtle. It certainly wasn’t a big turtle, but it was a good-sized baby. We were quite fond of it.  Notice that I am using the past tense to refer to this turtle, because the first night we had him, he disappeared.  The friend we had staying with us at the time said he heard thunking and scuffling around at night. In the morning, the turtle was missing.

We chalked it up to The Rat That Lived in The Radiator.

We were sad about the turtle, but he was just a baby, and, well… that’s life, I suppose.  It was a survival mechanism there, turning off your feelings.  You can’t care, or your heart will explode.  Life went on in Weinan, as life in China is wont to do. The days blend there; they’re all the same murky color in my memory, punctured by the sound of fireworks and the acrid smell of cigarette smoke.  It’s hard to describe China, but it’s easier now that I’m removed from it, now that I’m gone: China is busy, China is dirty, China is cold; the air is thick with a smell that can best be described as dishwater gray.

We got to Weinan in late August or early September. My memory is failing me a little here. All I know is that the first snowstorm of the season happened on my birthday: November 11th.  It was icy cold.  There was no heat in our apartment.  This all led to me dating the Frenchman, but that is a story for another time.  Regardless, my roommate and I shared a single heater that plugged into the wall and smelled like it would catch everything on fire.  Not that it mattered, considering our apartment was made from cinderblocks.

Anyway, around this time, we started barricading ourselves in our rooms at night in vain attempts to insulate ourselves against the cold.

That’s when the scratching started.

The Rat in the Radiator would come out at night and start scratching at our doors, trying to get inside.  Maybe our rooms were warmer than its radiator (the radiator did not turn on until mid-December) or maybe it just wanted to take a bite or two out of us while we slept.  Regardless, it tried every night and every day to get in.

It’s a mark of how numb we were that this did not strike us as odd.

One day I picked up a bar of soap in the bathroom and realized that something had been eating it.  The Rat.  Quickly, I looked up– it was lurking on one of the exposed pipes.  I knocked it down with a broom, and it ran away. I think it died in the radiator.  I don’t care, because we both left very soon after this incident.

Whenever anyone asks me about living in China, I have to say that I’m glad we went– I’m also glad we left.

We are the daughters of feminists who said, “you can be anything” and we heard “you have to be everything.”