Phnom Pehn

Describing Phnom Penh is difficult: you end up with a bitter taste in your mouth, sucked into an inevitable memory, submerged in a future development, insatiable and unchecked. Radical chic restaurants and bio-ethical shops, wide streets and shopping malls, Lucky supermarkets and Happy Herb Pizza.

It’s easy to find yourself lost, disoriented, wondering in which part of the world you happen to be. But there are a couple of things that can help you to make up your mind: the Tuol Seng Museum and the Choeng Ek killing fields are places that you will never forget.

April 17, 1975: the Kmher Rouge entered Phnom Penh establishing a new government. In three years of power more than two million people were killed.

"I am legally responsible for the deaths of more than a thousand people and I pray for their souls." We read in the testimony of a hierarch of Democratic Kampuchea.

How to accept, how to understand this?

Let’s drink the bitter cup of the memory, swalloying it with Angkor Beer, while listening absent-mindely to a Coldplay song. We stare out in front of a city that we cannot understand, without identifying its boundaries of sense, wondering if it is kneeling to capitalism or hiding its true nature in narrow streets, drowing it in open sewers, forgetting it in fashionable clothes and mixed fruit shakes.

We are leaving tomorrow, heading to Siem Reap, to admire the enigmatic smiles of Angkor temples.