I lost and recovered my old cell phone — there was this whole mini-drama. I might tell that story sometime.
But the phone clerk who sold me the new phone is very cute, and we’ve been talking. She invited me to some mountain with her friends, which I know from my students is a favorite Khmer picnic spot. I’m not sure of the details, as her English is a bit spotty and my Khmer is nascent.
Our IM conversation today:
This is like the Cambodian FSI course in format. Unfortunately, I’m not finding the mp3s anywhere online. The author has a web page here:
http://spokencambodian.110mb.com/
–where he explains the whole thing is free, and where he has put apparently just the first few lessons online. But these he has considerably modernized.
He mentions that the mp3s are online, but I haven’t found them. If you know where they are, post a comment!
This same guy also has an ebook for cheap where he talks about tooling around Asia on a motorcycle when he was 28. It’s called “Monks and Motorcycles.” Sounds like a groove:
http://www.lulu.com/product/e-book/monks-and-motorcycles/5751642
–I figure, if he’s going to put his “Modern Spoken Cambodian” course into the public domain and online, then I can give him some free advertising. Franklin E. Huffman, here’s to you.
I’m starting to get a sense of cooking.
Beans and rice. A ‘complete meal’ in the sense that, while neither food is nutritionally complete, between the two of them they are. They complement each other in such a way that they provide your bod with all the biochemical parts it needs to keep running.
This isn’t a remarkable meal — it’s a kind of trail mash that you might make while camping — but it’s significant for me personally because it’s the first meal that I figured out how to cook myself.
Not from a recipe, in other words.
The restrictions here are: a one-burner stove; no fridge; many kinds of food you can’t keep loose, because ants will get into it. If you ever travel to a third-world country, pack lots of tupperware. It can be hard to find.
It seems that the primary skills of cooking depend on understanding cooking time, understanding what’s going on in the cooking — is the food absorbing water, is it carmelizing, etc — and, of course, managing the taste of the end result.
So, this is my morning breakfast: (more…)
The most wonderful thing in the Universe happened today.
Music and video in Cambodia are pirated. It’s the only way to get anything. (And it’s not much cheaper than Blockbuster.) I came back too early for my order to be ready, and while I was waiting a girl walked by, looked in, lingered, and walked on.
So, I caught up with her, and said, “Excuse me. I have five minutes before my discs are ready. I wonder if you’d like to have a beer?”
She said, “Uhhh–” Looked me over, I guess decided I wasn’t scary, and said, “Sure.” She was German.
So found a bar and we were chatting. And the waiter-host who was running the bar interrupted us. He asked Alex, the girl, “Excuse me. Have I seen you before? Have we met?”
She said, “I don’t know. Maybe. But today is my first day here.”
“Oh,” he said: “Then maybe not… Foreigners all look the same.”
From the stats that the blog software gives me, a surprising number of people are coming to my page looking for information on Cambodian hookers. And particularly it seems there was a news story that people are curious about.
The news story was about a Westerner who was stabbed by a hooker. Thoughts on that further on — see ‘the shocking news’ subhead.
So, the general information: For Westerners, a night with a girl costs around $20. For locals, it seems it’s around $5. In some areas, probably less. I was woken up late at night in the place where I used to live by a last-minute negotiation between a john and a hooker at the next door down. She wanted $50. He was saying, “No… not fifty dollars. I don’t know, I mean, you spent all night telling me you’re not that kind of girl, and now you want fifty dollars…”
Basic Misunderstandings
The primary thing to come to terms with as a john is that she’s not dealing with you because she likes you: she’s dealing with you because she wants the money. This is a basic understanding, but some men seem to have a lot of trouble with it. For example: (more…)
Some vendors at their carts. They push these out in the morning and home at night. Those rag-ropes tying the handles together allow them to push with their bellies.
The park where the vendors work. I’ve no idea of the park’s function or dedication. (more…)
Walking through the city last night, I passed a small crowd of Khmer in a park. They were playing aggressive rap music and dancing what looked like an Asian version of the hokey-pokey.
I got a strange phone call. Someone called yesterday and said he wanted to meet me. It sounded really shady. He kept asking me where I was. He was talking kind of quietly, and referred to my old job that I’d left.
I pretended I couldn’t hear him and hung up.
I stopped around at the school that I figured might have been calling to offer me a job. (But why would they want to meet me?) After a tortured conversation, the receptionist checked and told me that the man who called me was “in the provinces.” We agreed he could email me.
That was yesterday. Today, I got the phone call again. He wanted to meet me. He sounded bolder. I kept asking who he was; I think he might have given me the name of my old landlord, several moves ago. Finally, he came out with it:
My visa (he said) was no good. Did I know the law in Cambodia? He would report me to the Embassy. He said something about the police, too. (more…)
This is just a quick post to explain why Cambodian traffic fills me with horror. You’ll have to imagine the shots that got away — like the teenage girl on a motorbike making a turn against traffic in an intersection with no light while writing a text message on her phone. Or the woman sitting on the back of a motorbike, facing backwards, holding the handles of a wheelbarrow-style vending carts, of the kind pictured below, so as to pull it along behind them like a trailer. (more…)
Khmer are often impressed by my height, not always favorably. During the recent Water Festival, I walked past a mother and her three-year old boy. The boy saw me and started screaming. He clung to his mother’s leg in terror until I was well away from them. (more…)
Last night, I was hanging out with two very nice young women. Westerners. It was nice to find people who share my values.
(more…)
