Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Cambodia Trip : Day 1, 5-12-2008 (NTU – Phnom Penh)

We departed from NTU at 4am in the morning to Changi airport. After a two hours plane flight, we arrived at the Kingdom of Cambodia. Auntie Esther was there to welcome us. She introduced our tour guide for that day, 'Pixels' (I dunno how it spell but the pronunciation is something like this). He is a third year uni student studying tourism coming from Baray, the place we were going to offer our help. He brought us to go shopping in the Russian market and central market. As I sucked at bargaining, I didn't get a lot of good deals. It is fun to see how my fellow team mates bargained. The sellers charged us a higher price as it was evident that we were tourist and all us were wearing the same LDP shirt, marking us as 'water fish'. But if you are good at bargain, you should be able to lower the price by 30 to 50 percent. After shopping, we went for a boat ride on Mekong river. It was an enjoyable boat ride. We were watching the sunset on the boat while eating our dinner. My impression of Phnom Penh is that it is a city of contrast. The basic facilities there such as condition of the road, lamp post, buildings are worse than my home town, which is just a small town in Perak, Malaysia. However, as this is the capital city, I can see a lot of high tech gadgets being sold here. I even saw a advertisement showing that Macbook Air was sold in the shop. My feeling is that even though Phnom Penh the capital city and is full of shops, the basic facilities there fail to reflect the status of the city. This I think is the responsibility of the government of Cambodia.

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