Halong Bay Lowlights

We are travelling in Vietnam, which is overall a very beautiful and interesting country. I'd expected Halong Bay to be one of the high points of the journey--mysterious rock formation rising out of the sea shrouded in mist and all that. Unfortunately the Vietnamese tourist industry has done their best to ruin it all. The only real way to see it signing up for a cruise, which all have a very pack 'em in, pack 'em out mentality. I think we actually signed up for one of the better ones too (the food was decent, we weren't freezing cold or wet at night, there weren't constant attempts to trick us out of money). What really annoyed me though was the mentality of packing people together and constantly "entertaining" them. The bay is majestic on its own, or it would be if we weren't constantly interrupted with karaoke, vegetable carving demonstrations, bad jokes, excursions to buy knick knacks. Incidentally, we learned nothing historical about the area nor any geological information about the rock formations. The junks which ply the bay do not sail at all, but are instead powered by noisy polluting engines. The sails are just decorations which they sometimes remember to throw up to make it look quaint.

The saddest moment was when we were offered an opportunity to pay extra to take a "bamboo rowboat" out to see a quiet inlet. It all started out well (aside from the fact that our boat was in no way constructed from bamboo). The rower made for a large stone arch. It was finally quiet, except for the birds of prey calling in the distance. Just as I was relaxed and happy we passed under the arch and made a beeline for the next empty spectacle--island monkeys for tourists to throw bread at. Then I realized our boat was along an invisible conveyer belt of other such non-bamboo bamboo boats, and all of them headed straight for the monkeys, threw bread at them for 5 minutes, then went straight back again. It's not a good idea for tourists to feed wild animals, but I suspect these animals weren't even indigenous, but were rather just hauled to that point specifically for tourists to throw bread at.

The photograph of the penguin trashcan is from the "cave tour." It would be a great new layer of hell to supplement Dante's Inferno for the 21st century. Many boatloads of tourists were crushed together as though it were rushhour on a New York subway and herded through caverns that were heavily damaged by all the sight seers breaking off rock formations and scrawling graffiti. The tour guides pointed out sections of the cave that looked vaguely like camel's heads and penises under the garish green and red lighting, and the obedient throng snapped constant photographs, creating a constant unpleasant strobe effect with their camera flashes.

The other photograph is from when they dumped us in kayaks to paddle around some tourist dump-off station for 20 minutes. Note Jenny's facial expression as our delighted tour guide takes a comemerative photo to hang on our mantle.

strange mnemonics

My khmer is improving, but fluency is a long ways off. I can usually be understood when communicating simple ideas about prices, directions, etc. but I have a lot of trouble distinguishing sounds when people are talking to me.

Typical conversation:

me: sus 'dai (hello)

shopkeeper: sus 'dai (hello)

me: Chung ban pom. T'lai pon man? (I want apples. How much do they cost?)

shopkeeper: blah blah blah blah blah blah

me: uhhh...

shopkeeper: tells me the price in English, and I walk away humbled.

My vocabulary is expanding at least, and I find the only way I can remember words is by making up illogical associations for them. The following may not be of interest to any other living human, but the internet being full of such echo chambers, what the hell. Here are a few of the dozens of mnemonic tricks I have for new words:

sam sub (30)--imagining that a sandwich from the fast food establishment "Sam's Subs" costs $30

ma noa (pineapple)--imagining the wife of Noah with nothing to eat but pineapple on the arc

bon lai (vegetable)--imagining giving a dog a fake bone carved out of a parsnip=telling a bone lie

mea (golden)--a childhood friend was very close to a girl named Mia. To him, she was golden.

re'ap ka (married)--first word sounds kind of like reap. Ka was one of the Egyptian souls. When you are married you know the soul of another person, therefore you reap ka.

saa mo'an (chicken meat)--I imagine the chicken moaning as it's being slaughtered

kro-dah (paper)--first sound=crow, second sound=da, to give in Spanish. I picture a very clever crow delivering a message written on scrap of paper to a wizard.

kom-but (knife)--I'm calm, but I have a knife, so don't mess with me.

pang pa (tomato)--During the great depression Pa was so poor he had nothing to eat but tomatoes, which gave him terrible stomach pangs.

t'ror kol (surname)--First sound is kind of like the norse god Thor, second sound is like col, the Spanish word for cabbage. No idea why these images should help me remember surname, but somehow it works.

The only drawback of the system is that I tend to pronounce the English word that the sound reminds me of, which is ultimately different.

wildly inaccurate statistics

So in my last post I mentioned "a dozen live ducks" as typical cargo to carry on a single motorcycle in Cambodia. I forgot how many ducks such a motorcycle might reasonably carry and estimated about 12. Today though, I noticed another typical poultry-mobile, and counted well over thirty live ducks hanging off the back (tied by the feet, several layers thick).

Not exactly cruelty free, but an economic alternative to refrigerating soon to be consumed meat.

Motorcycles as a form of mass transit

Yesterday some of my students were telling me with a straight face that in Cambodia you can get fined by the police for riding a motorcycle with more than one passenger, and I had to stop myself from laughing. Really? On my commute this morning I decided to do an informal census of how many motorcyclists had two or more passengers and counted 32. How many were being ticketed by the police? Yea, right. I'm sure you can get ticketed for it, but it would be like getting jury duty--a variety of occasional bad luck that cannot be predicted, but at least there's some way to get out of it (in Cambodia, a small on the spot donation to the cop to reward his vigilance).

Of course human passengers are the most mundane sort of cargo to ferry by motorcycle in Phnom Penh. Here are some of my favorites in no particular order of ranking:

1) two 15' lengths of rebar

2) a dozen live ducks

3) two squealing pigs

4) an industrial-sized pot of hot soup

5) a large pane of window glass.

The three stooges would love it here.

The picture for this post is not my own, just the first thing that came up in a google search for "Cambodia motorcycle whole family." It's fairly accurate except that normally the father ONLY would be wearing a helmet.

Visit to Angkor

Long time no post! When I'm busy, there's no time to sit and write a blog entry, when I'm not, there's not much to blog about. This pic was taken atop Phnom Bakheng, one of my favorite places at the Angkor ruins. It was a very rainy day, but it stopped pouring right as I arrived at the site. For the next 20 minutes everything appeared misty and magical, and there were clouds of dragon flies hovering above the central shrine. The weather also had the beneficial effect of scaring away a lot of the tourists and the hawkers that day. Phnom means hill, and the fortified temple complex is a step pyramid built atop a natural rise. It actually reminded me a lot of Mesoamerican architecture in this respect. It was also meant to evoke the mythical Mt. Meru (a sort of Hindu/Buddhist Mt. Olympus).

There are many, many temples, gates, bridges, libraries and palaces at Angkor. On this first trip Jenny and I really only grazed the surface. Some of my favorite things were actually the low-relief murals of mythology and historical battles lining the walls of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. Of course, the way the jungle has taken over many of the sights was also pretty cool.

There are also a few factors that make Ankgor somewhat less magical than it should be. Mainly, there are a lot of vendors in and around the ruins, far worse than I experienced in Mexico. I remember that Teotihuacan was bad in the middle of the day, but you could at least escape to a more secluded area of the site. At Angkor it seems, the more remote, lesser temples have hawkers that are all the more desperate for tourist dollars, precisely because their location isn't as prime. There are a lot of poor people in Cambodia, and in a way you can't blame them for trying to make money however they can. But still, if I'm sitting in your restaurant, do you really need to send your kids to my table to hawk postcards as I'm trying to eat? I found it pretty stressful to deal with the dozens of people over the course of each day who were trying to hustle us for money. It often left me too guarded and on-edge to find any wonder in what I was seeing. Whenever we escaped the annoying vendors though, it was a truly amazing place.

Do you like meat? What kind of meat do you like?

I'm continuing to study the Khmer language, learning lots of new words, but having trouble with pronunciation. My tutor gives me flash cards to study at home, but reading the words written in the roman alphabet doesn't tell you much about how they're pronounced (for example the word Khmer itself is actually pronounced more like K'mai). I think part of the problem is training myself to hear the sounds that don't exist in English before I can even pronounce them. I remember having Mexican students that couldn't distinguish between words like cheap and chip without practice. Some weird thing where your brain can't find what its not looking for.

So I've started recording my teacher Nim to listen to how she forms vowels. We meet in a busy coffee shop, so the sound quality isn't great, but anyway here is a rather odd, if typical sequence:

Also, I can add the following to things I've successfully communicated outside the safety net of language class:

• Turn left, turn right, go straight, stop here
• Check please
• How much does it cost?
• Beer, ice, hot coffee, iced coffee
• How are you?, I am fine
• I'm studying Khmer, a little
• Goodbye
• May I see a menu? (Not that the restaurant had menus).

traffic at Orussey market today

two minutes of chaos shot from the back of a tuc tuc

Cambodian 7-Eleven 

Don't order the deep fried morning glory

For a long time I've subscribed to the theory that deep fat frying is a culinary equalizer that makes everything good--it works the same for onions as Twinkies. However, this is one of many fronts in which Cambodia is still an alternate universe for me. I ordered deep fried morning glory in a coffee shop because it was cheap. The closest thing I could compare it to would be weeds fried in cod liver oil. I couldn't get rid of the taste and suffered greasy, fishy belches the rest of the day.

Everything else I've eaten here has been awesome though, and generally under $2 a plate (including cold tea to wash it down). This being from the equivalent of a diner or something. If I get up the courage to eat more street food it might be even cheaper.

Completely unrelated: Since I hope to learn at least some Khmer, and I am a true beginner, I thought I'd try to keep some track of vocabulary as I learn it to investigate a little about language acquisition. With Spanish, which I more or less speak, almost everyone knows some words and there lots of cognates and so on. With Khmer, I'm more like Kasper Hauser or the wild boy of Aveyron.

Words/phrases I've said and been understood: Hello, good morning, thank you, left, no.

Words/Phrases I've understood:

Hello, good morning, thank you, two, seven, eleven.

Independence Monument

pretty cool for concrete

wat decorations

Pure Reverse Osmosis Water

I'm super-enthused about the special powers of this free cup of water I got while waiting at the optometrist. So far it's my favorite thing about Cambodia, but I am still pretty jet lagged (last night at 2 AM my brain decided it was time to wake up and start the day).