Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Day 445: Angkor National Museum

The Angkor National Museum is one of two places where artifacts from the Angkor Archaeological Park have been brought for safekeeping (the other one is the National Museum in Phnom Penh, or so I hear). After my three visits to the temples, I completed my Angkor experience with a visit to the museum today.

The museum was really quite fancy, with many video screens, well-made displays and good explanations. Unfortunately, it was really crowded: mostly by big tour groups, who were mostly Japanese. As a result, all the videos played in Japanese, not in English, and so I got to watch maybe one out of ten.

Photography was prohibited in all indoor areas, so the only visual impression I can leave you with is one of the few exhibits that stood in an outside corridor:


This is quite representative for the entire museum, however: there were statues upon statues of male and female deities, apsaras, animals, and so on. Especially statues of deities and apsaras are rarely to be seen in the temples themselves anymore - small wonder when they've all been collected for the museum.