gastronomical adventurism

durian 

gnome sauie

I recently tried two new foods endemic in Cambodia.  The first was the infamous durian, that limburger of fruits famously banned from hotels, public transportation and the like.  To me the pungent smell is kind of like strong garlic--very unbecoming of a fruit.  When the lady at the market cut open the green, thorny shell for me, it was a little like dissecting an arthropod.  After extracting the meat, she cocooned it in several layers of plastic and styrofoam, presumably to keep in the smell.  (It didn't work, the whole fridge smelled like durian once I brought it home).  The appearance and texture make it seem more like something you would dig out of the belly of a whale than fruit, but I gave it a try anyway.  Thankfully the taste is milder than the acrid aroma, but it was still quite rich.  It's richness and texture made it almost like eating very ripe avocado.  I still can't decide whether I like it or not.

My second new gastronomical exploit was a breakfasty thing served out of a cart.  Normally I strictly avoid street food in Cambodia, but this looked good and hygenic and steaming hot.  It's hard to write the name of it in the roman alphabet, but the first word sounds like 'gnome' (a prefix attached to bread/cake-like foods) and the second word something like 'sauwie' (pronouncing the W without moving your mouth).  Inside a crepe are white rice, black rice, fresh shredded cocounut, sugar, and a few beans.   It's mildly sweet and very hearty, good energy to start the day with.  They also cost 25 cents apiece, making them my new favorite breakfast.

Khmenglish

Just as there is an Espanglish which is neither English nor Spanish, there is a nebulous area between English and Khmer as well. The most common might be Cambodian words appropriated from English: Kah-FEY (coffee), mah-SEEN (machine), mah-SAW (massage), though I think they can legitimately be considered part of their language at this point.

One of the funniest to me is the word "Chuh", which I get called all the time. It's Khmenglish for "teacher": The first syllable is dropped, and the pesky r at the end is too tricky to pronounce.

Then there is the doubling down on certain one syllable words, which is common in the Khmer language. (For example you really can say "chop-chop" for hurry/soon). So in Khmenglish we have small-small instead of small, and same-same instead of same. And of course same-same's ever present cousin "same-same but different". (I think this means similar). If you're a male out on certain streets in the late evening, you may well receive solicitations for "boom-boom."

Another area might be sentiments that when expressed in English (however well spoken) just sound odd. For example, Cambodians sometimes ask, "Last night, did you have a good dream?" along with "Hello, how are you?". I also often find people wishing me good luck out of the blue.

Me: "So you'll be here to pick me up at 5:00, right?"

Motorcycle taxi driver: "Yes, good luck for you! Bye." (Hangs up phone).

This sort of thing leads me to worry whether or not he's actually coming at 5 pm, but it's not intended that way at all. Cambodians also sometimes like to say "See you when you see me" as a goodbye. If you speak enough Khmer this apparently has a humorous double meaning. ("me" is the word for noodles, but I don't get the rest of it).

One of my favorite English-that-isn't episodes took place when Jenny and I were traveling in Vietnam over December. We were visiting a royal tomb outside Hue, and there was a banana vendor along the path from the parking lot to the entrance. A local family's orchard abutted this pathway, and so they had posted one of their daughters to lean over the fence hawking fruit. As I mentioned in an earlier post, despite fluttering hammer and sickle flags on every government building, the Vietnamese are the most doggedly entrepreneurial people on Earth. (God help those lazy fatcats on Wall Street if the Vietnamese ever switch systems of government). The girl spoke no or very little English, but had memorized a single sales pitch "Hello lady you like banana!" It didn't matter if you were a couple, a group of old men, whatever, you were still 'lady'. She had clearly been chanting this pitch for hours upon hours, slowly warping the rhythm, pronunciation and stressed syllables to create a kind of sound poetry. It was really hypnotic and actually kind of beautiful.

The Cult of Uncle Ho

So I don't want my negative take on HaLong Bay to be my only record of Vietnam. We experienced a lot of cool things on our visit. One of the more interesting was the reverence still given Ho Chi Minh. Every museum shop has its own collection of Uncle Ho bric-a-brac, even those with no connection whatsoever to the 20th century. For example, I got several items (pictured) at The Temple of Literature, a Confucian temple and the first university in Vietnam.

Of course in Hanoi it is also possible to view Ho Chi Minh himself. His corpse is laid out á la Lenin in a mausoleum on public display. It cannot be photographed. There is a whole procession visitors must go through, putting one's camera in a little numbered bag at one station, then surrendering it at the next station, and finally picking it up again at a third station at the exit. The Vietnamese get dressed up to visit the mausoleum--three piece suits for men, traditional dresses for women, uniforms with medals for veterans. (It was kind of Twilight Zone to see decorated Vietnam vets from the other side). If you don't dress conservatively, you are turned away.

The exterior of the mausoleum is very Soviet--heavy, imposing, without embellishment. Filing along there was a lot of red carpet and velvet rope, with young soldiers standing at attention in crisp white dress uniforms. Inside it is cool and dark (presumably to prevent damage to the corpse). The vitrine housing his mummy sits on a pedestal rising out of a recess in the floor about three feet deep. There is a soldier posted on each corner (bayonets gleaming in the dim light), but because they stand in this hollow, Ho lies resting above their heads. His face was waxy, fuzzy and unreal, yet sublime and contented. I couldn't help but pause and strain to look a second longer, which prompted a guard to clench my upper arm in his white glove and firmly move me along out the door.

The rest of the museum campus (sort of like the mall in Washington DC) was generally less interesting. There was a museum where the first floor contained deathly dull letters and black and white photos of Vietnamese revolutionaries and a second floor that was baffling beyond description. It was notable for a scam artist posing as a university student giving a survey about tourism and then suddenly asking for Red Cross donations.

There was also the house where Ho Chi Minh lived during the critical such and such period, which, if I had grown up in Vietnam and studied the minutia of his life during history class, might have been more interesting. Or possibly not, as the school children there were singularly fascinated with feeding the ducks. The western tourists in turn were all singularly fascinated with über-cute Vietnamese kindergardeners in precious little school uniforms feeding ducks. So if you're curious why Vietnam has fallen short of the Marxist-Leninist paradise envisioned by Ho Chi Minh, it's possibly the counterrevolutionary activity of the ducks.

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.