Some snippets

Here are some more snippets from various stops on my trip.

I've realized that some of the things I save for snippets are things that really bothered me at the time, and I couldn't bring myself to write about them when I first experienced them. But a few days or weeks later, they are remote enough that while they still bother me, I can write about them. Maybe I'm embarrassed to share that I have bad feelings sometimes? Not that I should be embarrassed, sometimes my bad feelings exist for good reason. Anyway...

From Cambodia:  My motodup driver around Phnom Penh was about 26 or 27, so was born after the Khmer Rouge's height of power. His parents had lived in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, and they were forced to leave the city and all of their stuff and go to work on a rice farm. They survived, but they had a baby/toddler daughter. She got sick with some ordinary childhood disease but her parents had neither food nor medicine to give her, and she died.


And speaking of the Khmer Rouge... At S-21, the former high school turned prison in Phnom Penh, one of the rooms contained several pieces of torture equipment found in the jail and paintings depicting how the instruments were used. One of these pieces was a waterboarding apparatus, and the accompanying painting was exactly like the descriptions I've read about waterboarding in U.S. publications. I'm sure you've heard that for a while (and maybe still?!?) the U.S. Goverment thought it was perfectly OK to waterboard people.

The equipment.

How it's used.

It made me so ashamed that my country would use the same kind of devices that the Khmer Rouge used to torture people ... my vision blurred with anger and shame a little bit. In all of my travels, I've never once been embarrassed or ashamed to say I was an American, even when the U.S. would do something stupid like invade Iraq for no reason, or build a McDonalds on every street corner in Europe. But in that room, if someone had asked me where I was from, I would have said Canada. :( Note to U.S. Government: Doing shit the Khmer Rouge liked to do is not cool. :(

Exchanging money: By the time I reached Sri Lanka, I'd learned to accurately judge how much cash I would need, and on subsequent stops when I had a small amount left over, I would exchange it at the airport for the next country's currency. I wish I'd developed that habit earlier, as I've been carrying around small amounts of cash from Ghana, Kenya, Egypt and Tanzania. Not enough cash that I'm paranoid about having it get lost or stolen, but it's more cash than I would just give away as souvenirs. It will be worth exchanging, if I can. I usually think of stuff like trading in my currency, I'm not sure why I spaced on it in my first few stops.

Most currency exchanges will exchange Egyptian pounds (I'm just waiting for a place with a good rate) but the other three currencies are proving impossible to get rid of. And I learned just on April 4 that Ghana and Tanzania forbid people from removing their currency from those countries! So reputable currency exchanges might not exchange it at all. And it makes me an international criminal. haha. I hope that means Interpol will come after me, and someone will create a great computer game called Where in the World is Gabrielle Sudik? Hopefully, I'll meet people who are planning trips to those countries, and can sell them my currency directly.

From Australia: Remember that little Gaol I toured near Darwin? The next day, on the way back from my tour to Litchfield Park, we drove past it. Our guide, Reuben, who described himself as "half Aboriginie, half Australian" said that back in the 1970s his uncle used to be in that gaol a lot for public drunkenness (I'm guessing his uncle was from the Aboriginal half lol). The fence around the gaol was only waist-high, so Reuben's auntie would bring around 6-packs of beer to pass over the fence to his uncle.

Everywhere: I'm starting to forget everything I've written. Have I mentioned that every place on the planet hangs its laundry out to dry? I expected it in places like Ghana and Cambodia. I didn't expect it in places like Singapore, where it's very clean and wealthy. But even there, every high-rise apartment building has rods projecting from windows or balconies, covered in clothing. It's such an easy way to save money and electricity, while getting a small workout. I'm not sure why hanging clothes out to dry, in warm months at least, has become less common in the States, and even banned by some communities. Really, a washed t-shirt on a string is not a blight on a neighborhood. What hooey.

So, OK, not everyone hangs their laundry inside old slave trade forts, like they do in Ghana, but still, it's good for the environment.