The Trip Thus Far

Greetings from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam!

We are getting into the flow of our backpacking venture, so I suppose ít's time for an update. We arrived safely to Phnom Penh about 5 days ago, and from the beginning I have been amazed how unstressful and relaxing this trip has been. The hostels are significantly cleaner than those in my India experience, and the people are much less pushy. Not to mention that Cambodia was warm--a welcome respite from Busan.

The thing we've done so far that has left the greatest impression on me is visiting Tuol Sleng, the genocide museum on the site where the Khmer Rouge held a prison and torture facility, and the Killing Fields. I've been inundated with what MESPers would recognize as the Children of Empire syndrome (my concurrent reading of Brian Wâlsh's Colossians Remixed also contributing) in thêse experiences too.

Aside from recognizing the horrors of what occurred, walking through the museum was a stark contrast to visiting Yad Váshem in Jerusalem, for example. Though the Khmer Rouge's takeover of Cambodia was relatively recent, the museum already looked rather disheveled. Photos of the victims were brown and discolored, and the plaques that told the stories of prisoner's experiences were not hanging, but just propped up against the wall on the ground. Even human remains were mêrely sitting in cabinets. I was struck again by how quickly the poor's voices are forgotten.

I was talking with one of the CRWM missionaries we met with, and she was wondering in what shape the museum would be in in 30 years, or if the evidence of those atrocities could be better preserved. In any case, I have been amazed at the tenacity of spirit manifest within the Cambodian people.

On another topic, I found myself in a bit of a pickle when we arrived at the Phnom Pẹnh airport. The visas were, in my humble opinion, egregious space gluttons, and they covered my last open passport page. This was a bit disconcerting since I still needed my visa for Vietnam. We visited the US Embassy to see about adding passport pages, but they were eminently unhelpful. Fortunately the Vietnamese embassy was willing to place their full-page visa in my endorsement section. Hopefully my re-entry visa to Cambodia will be smaller, but I'm hoping they'll follow Vietnam's lead. Moral of the story: when taking a trip, make sure to have more than 1 empty page in the passport. Duly noted.