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.