Phnom Penh

It is our second day in Cambodia's capitol city and the weather is hot, hot hot. We arrived around noon yesterday, checked into a hotel and headed straight for Psar O Russei, a huge market where we ate from one of the busy food stalls. We had a fifty- cent plate of thin fried noodles with vegetables and then had some Cambodian sweets and dragonfruit for dessert. From there, we headed to the National Museum where we admired over a millenia's worth of Khmer sculpture. The museum was housed in a beautiful early 20th century terracotta building of traditional design. After having a look at the exhibits, we relaxed in the museum's courtyard where we both briefly passed out from heat exhaustion and dehydration. We vowed to always have a large bottle of water with us at all times from then on and then headed to the Royal Palace. The majority of the complex is home of the country's king, which is closed to the public, but we were able to wander around many of the pagodas and stupas. The most impressive of the sights there was the Silver Pagoda, whose floor is covered with 5000 1 kg silver tiles. We had dinner at a really popular local restaurant after a scheming monk at a wat (temple) asked us for money for his personal pursuits.
Today, in an effort to escape the brutal heat, we started our day early, taking a moto-taxi to the Russian market and hit up some more food stalls for breakfast. For an after breakfast snack, we got some durian. We wallked to the Tuol Sleng Museum, a very sad and depressing museum documenting the brutality of the Khmer Rouge during 1975-1979 at the S-21 Prison, which is where the museum is now located. At the museum, there are thousands of photographs of all the prisoners who were tortured and killed there, with all the photos and documents in the rooms where this brutality had taken place. It was very intense and sad how many atrocities like this have already happened in the past and how many like this continue to occur. Don't we ever learn?
We are now back at the hotel escaping the midday heat and will walk around when the temperature starts to cool down this afternoon. We plan to adopt this new strategy of sightseeing as it is going to continue to get hotter as the days pass. Tomorrow we head to Siem Reap and will spend a few days at Angkor Wat.