Today is Feb 16th, we woke up in Phnom Penh this morning. The boat is an amazing way to bridge distances, I love the convenience. It makes life so easy but a bit confusing because the days follow one after the other, you change location, you tour a town, or a village, a fish farm, a brick factory, but at the end of the week it is hard (at least for me) to remember the order it took place.....But today stands out with the visit of the royal palace of Phnom Penh (the spelling keeps on changing on signs I saw in town..)and the incredible lecture we had from the PHD lady professor who lived thrue 4 different regimes since her childhood and was deplaced, suffered from the kmehr Rouge regime lived in Paris, San Francisco , Maine and has now returned to Cambodia to find her roots....and some identity. I could have talked to her all day but we had to go on with our visit schedule and the Palace was waiting for us, with its beautiful asian roofs arching graciously to the sky with buddahs and cobras and monkeys and elephants statues and a garden adorned with fountains with fragile and beautiful lotus floating langorously at the surface. The walls of the coronation room were oozing with gold and precious stones, a big green buddha statue called the emerald buddah but in fact made out of almost translucide jade like I never saw that color of green before, was standing on top of a gold altar, it was gaudy, too much for my taste and Norodom Sihanuk has never been my cup of tea as far as i can remember, he was some kind of puppet king, I think that's what my father used to say when I was a child at that time! When you remember what the people of this country went thrue for the last 60 years, you cannot look at that gold and feel good about it, too much suffering, to much blood shed....we could not bear going to the War Museum this afternoon and the Killing Fields either, to heavy for us, we went shopping instead, but because of the New year, the Russian market was closed and we ended up at the Central Market, 2nd best in choices. One vendor had attractive goods for us and then we went back to the ship in a rickshaw for 2 dollars! The weather is incredible, today 34 degres celtius, and some humidity. We walked to the National Museum and it was HOT...I found lovely watercolors to send as notecards for the family.