The NYT tries to capture the vibe of modern-day Phnom Penh.

Some excerpts:

IT'S a late Saturday afternoon in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the waterfront along the Tonle Sap River is the place to be. As clusters of elderly women sit on concrete benches overlooking the water, peddlers set up stands from which they sell slices of fresh pineapple while youngsters on motorbikes deftly weave among the crush of pedestrians. Boat captains yell out to passing couples, offering sunset rides on their tiny wooden vessels, as shirtless children swim or fish in the muddy water. Suddenly, a lone elephant, gently guided by its young handler, majestically makes its way through the crowd.

At this moment, Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, seems frozen in time, as the scene in front of you plays out much the way it must have 70 or 80 years ago, when Cambodia was part of French-controlled Indochina and the city was known as the Pearl of Asia. But then you notice the bank of A.T.M.'s in the nearby storefronts, the Internet cafes crammed with fashionably dressed teenagers checking their e-mail, the sleek air-conditioned bars with names like Metro and Heart of Darkness. And all around you, you hear a polyglot of languages — English, French, Korean, Spanish, Chinese — that are a testament to this city's reappearance on the global tourism map.

In fact, after a few days in this city, you notice that Phnom Penh has something of a “next Prague” vibe about it — a place where many young people from around the world, heady with excitement and the thrill of the unknown, are coming to reinvent themselves. At least that is what it feels like as you run into groups of Americans hanging out in one of the cramped nightclubs along Sisowath Quay, or vie with Australian expatriates for a table during the crowded two-for-one happy hour at the Elephant Bar in the Raffles Hotel, or scan page after newspaper page of job listings in the English-language Cambodia Daily. ...

Sitting at the F.C.C. (Foreign Correspondents' Club) today, one can barely imagine what Phnom Penh was like in the 1970s, when the country was under the brutal repression of the Khmer Rouge -- a period later immortalized in the film, "The Killing Fields." But a remnant of that past can be found at Tuol Sleng, more commonly known as the genocide museum. No matter what you remember from history books or news reports, nothing can quite adequately prepare you for reality of what Cambodians lived through while under the four-year rule of Pol Pot, when nearly 2 million Cambodians (about a fourth of the country's population) were exterminated.

Set incongruously in a lovely residential neighborhood, the genocide museum brings you up short almost immediately with a sign warning that any loud talking or laughter is strictly forbidden. That warning seems all but superfluous as you enter the first-floor galleries and see the walls covered with black-and-white face shots of the Khmer Rouge's many victims: Most of them, boys and girls alike, are heartbreakingly young. Some, incredibly, even managed a smile for their photographer. Silence seems the only appropriate response.

Here's some sample photos of Tuol Sleng prisoners:

The pictures were taken before the prisoners descended fully into the special hell of Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21).

Here are some of the rules they had to follow, as taken from Wikipedia:

1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

The people you see in the photos above would almost have certainly been tortured, and almost certainly have been killed. An estimated 20,000 people went through S-21; only seven are known to have survived.

There were 157 other Khmer Rouge prisons.

The mind-boggling thing about all this is that many the fashionably-dressed Cambodian teens mentioned above don't believe the auto-genocide of the Khmer Rouge years happened.

They can look it up on the Internet if they want.

Long-time readers of this blog will know I spent some ill-fated time in Cambodia. If you're a new visitor, you can read about it here.

One of my colleagues from that time was Guy Nicholson, who currently works for The Globe and Mail. When I had a catch-up beer with him last summer, it was after he had returned from a year of travelling that had taken him back to Cambodia.

He said in a way, I was fortunate to have been there in that 1996 period. While I described it as a Wild East city, Guy said it has calmed down a lot.

Back in the day, you could buy an AK-47 for about US$75. There was a gun range outside town that where you could fire not only your newly-purchased assault rifle, but you could shoot a mortar or rocket-propelled grenade! Woo-hoo! Be advised that I did none of those things; however, the reality of their existence illustrated the temper of the times. If you wanted to live a life without rules or mores, you were in the right place.

When the article mentions the FCC, I remember my first trip there, probably my third day in-country. I got off a moto and was immediately accosted by a young beggar with a horribly disfigured lower face and neck -- and very mocking eyes.

This sight caught me off guard. I somewhat numbly gave the kid some money, which set off a swarm from similarly disfigured kids delighted to pressure the pushover foreigner into slapping some coin on them too.

Obviously they found foreigners, especially those whose eyes hadn't yet been hardened to some of the obvious cruelties of Cambodian life, to be easy marks.

There was a story that some kind-hearted foreigner had offered to pay for restorative surgery for the kid. His parent, guardian or whoever nixed the idea. It seems the kid was too valuable as a beggar with the disfigurement. :(

In the Central Market, I was wandering around one day and someone tapped on my back. It was a beggar with no arms.

Sullen men missing a leg were everywhere -- a legacy of Cambodia's decades of conflict, and especially because of the curse of landmines.

In terms of modern-day Phnom Penh, however, reading about monks in saffron robes, the occasional elephant walking down the street, buying French-style baguettes on the street ... all those things are memories I still have of the place.

If some of the terrible poverty has been alleviated, some of the scars of conflict healed, one can only say "whew."

Cambodia has suffered terribly. I hope it sees better times ahead.