Cambodia, Part 3: some cultural highlights and sightseeing

I'll begin this post with the depressing then move onto the more fun and exciting.
I visited a couple tourist destinations in Phnom Penh, the capital. First, the Tuol Sleng genocide museum. This was a former high school that the Pol Pot regime used as a prison and torture center from 1975-1979. Here are the rules for the prison:And the location they would hang prisoners for questioning/torture--usually upside down so they could put their heads in water. There were many many rooms with artifactsand lots and lots of photos of prisoners. When they were taken into the prison, the first thing they did was take photos--some of them were very young children.

There were an estimated 17,000 prisoners through here and only seven are thought to have survived. Pol Pot and his regime were very efficient killers--millions of people in just a few short years. For those of you who don't know much about his reign, the brief version goes like this: he was a communist leader who desired a completely agrarian utopia in Cambodia--he believed only one or two million people were needed to make this happen, so they proceeded to evacuate the large cities and kill everyone that was educated, had contacts with the West, were of vietnamese, laotian or chinese ethnicities, among others who were suspect. They had a saying "To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss." They forced people to dig their own mass graves and then beat them to death to fill them up--so as not to waste bullets. This was a photo that was at the museum of the killing fields after excavation. *************************************
After that downer (but informative/educational) visit, I moved onto the royal palace and temple.
It's still used for official visits, but is mostly just a tourist destination.Here's a cool elephant topiary outside the front:

And me in front of my favorite buddhist/hindu symbol, the Naga (7-headed snake)
And some gardens outside the palace with the silver pagoda in the background:
There were lots of cool artifacts and statues inside, but of course no photos were allowed.
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After Phnom Penh, I went south with some of my students to Sihanoukville, a city on the coast. We visited some awesome waterfalls for an afternoon. It was the rainy season while I was there, so it rained most of the day, but it's so warm it doesn't really matter. Here are me and some of the students performing some Apsara dance poses in the pouring rain....
The waterfalls were really nice - there were many different areas you could sit and enjoy the water--it was quite warm and since it was raining most of the day, wasn't any colder than the air or rain. There were LOTS of posing and photos taken.....
On the way back from the waterfalls, we stopped in front of this giant dragon sculpture. His tail was located a few kilometers away sticking up out of the ground in another park.
I also visited a nice quilt shop in Siem Reap, the town near Angkor Wat temples. It was a shop to sell the handicrafts from women who sewed to send their children to school. Sadly they didn't sell fabric I could buy for a souvenir, but I did purchase a nice wallhanging.