Last night we were entertained by a local orphanage with national dancing. The children were about 12 - 16 years old.
Today was a day in Phnom Penh, we spent the morning at the National Museum, recently restored it houses more than 5,000 works of art, ranging from the 7th to 13th century. Unfortunately photographs were only aloud outside so I only have a few photos.
This is the representation of a yoni with a buffalo head, look closely at the front and this is the nose area, going back you will see the ears on the side and a faint outline of the eye and the horns above on the top.
We are fascinated with the asian style of petrol station, quite extraordinary. The fuel (not sure whether E10, Unleaded or Premium but you can guess) and cold drinks and cigarettes are all available as any good service station would have! We saw fuel like this in Siem Reap being pushed down the road and Kevin said it was a fuel tanker for the bottles of fuel being sold.
We walked back to the boat along the riverside which was just lovely and past the Royal Palace which we will visit inside this afternoon, after our lunch on board the boat.
The Royal Palace was built in 1866 as the home of the Cambodian King. Most parts of the Palace, except the Kings Building are open, the Prasat Prak (Prasat means temple and Prak means silver) was named because over 5,000 pieces of its floor tiles are made from silver, from melted down coins. Within the Silver Pagoda is a Buddha made from pure gold, has 2,086 diamonds attached to it and weighs over 90 kilograms. Made from the melted down coffin of the king when his body was cremated, as a final fulfilment of a request he made. Also housed in the pagoda is an emerald Buddha the same as the one we saw in Bangkok, however we were able to get a lot closer to this one to view it clearly. Unfortunately again no photographs inside were allowed.
We past this beautiful Buddhist temple and complex on our river front walk.
This is the Supreme Court building.
Although elephants are no longer used to transport the king, this is the original elephant shelter at the Royal Palace, now a museum type room.
The grounds within the Royal Palace were just so well maintained and beautiful.
Here is a display of the royal colours of the week each having their own meaning, each day of the week corresponds with a planet, and each planet has a personality of its own. So each day has a color which clothing should correspond to.
An ancient poem explains the days:
Red is for Sunday,
Orange truly looks like a beautiful moon,
Purple is reserved for Tuesday,
Wednesday is the green of the lieb plant
Thursday is the yellowish green of the leaves of a banana palm
Happy Friday is blue and must be tidy,
Saturday is the color of ripe pring (a type of plum) according to the ages
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