On gangnam style, new food experiences, and perspective matters

Dear friends and family,

That’s right folks, Gangnam Style has reached even rural villages in Cambodia. Every night the restaurant down the street plays music really loud, and every night I watch my 2 year old brother dance along to gangnam style. If you have not heard of Gangnam style, get out from under your rock and take a look on youtube. This song from the Korean singer Psy is the biggest song to hit the world since… I don’t know… since Justin Bieber’s Baby Baby, or probably even bigger. On the other hand, if you haven’t heard this song, you should probably get bonus points for not conforming to the ways of the world! Trust me, you are not missing much.  It is kind of sad really how much influence there is through television here, starting with kids so young. Some of you may have seen my comment on facebook how less than 1% of homes in my district that electricity, but 72% have televisions. These televisions and any lights are powered by batteries, which are recharged by someone who has made a business of buying a generator and charging batteries. You don’t really expect to walk around a rural Cambodian village where nearly 100% of people still farm a small plot of rice with a cow or water buffalo, and see kids running around singing “sexy lady” (not having a clue what it means), and dancing gangnam style. But unfortunately it seems that is the way things go here. Every day the world is getting smaller, and you’ve got to run just to stand still. For Cambodia, that partially entails a push to learn English in schools and the idolization of all things Korean, including their music.

On a more positive note, I often forget to mention it, but hardly a week goes by when I don’t try at least one new fruit or vegetable or food. This week I tried a sauce for dipping sour fruit, which, if I understood correctly, is made from tiny frogs. It didn’t taste very good, even before I knew it was made from tiny frogs. I also tried palm fruit juice fresh from a palm fruit that my mother was cutting up to put in soup. This WAS good. She said you can’t buy them at the market here and have to get them from friends with sugar palm trees. And as you might have guessed, this fruit is also used for making sugar. My mother brought me to see a small family operation where they were boiling a huge shallow dish of the stuff outside. My host mother also tried to teach me how to separate good rice from un-husked rice. Most families in the country buy huge bags of rice that have been poorly sorted with some of the un-husked rice still remaining. My mother showed me how to put a scoop of rice into a shallow woven basket with little rice sized holes. The smaller husked rice falls through, and the inedible bits collect in the centre. These are then fed to the chickens. The circular sifting motion is actually much harder than it looks! I had a delicious dessert the other day. It was balls of rice steeped in a red wine. It was actually delicious. I also wrapped noom (cake) for the first time (the kind of cake that is actually sticky rice normally with some combination of banana, coconut, pig fat/soybean inside). Mine looked rather sloppy I am afraid, but it was fun to try! Next week I am attending my first Cambodia wedding. I am pretty much guaranteed to have new food to try there, though I am not so sure if I am looking forward to delicacies that they will offer!

I thought I should give a bit of an update on my language “lessons” for those of you curious about how I am getting along. For a long time I felt like I wasn’t really making any progress, but now looking back, I am able to understand so much more and communicate so much more with people. Even though I haven’t memorized lists of vocabulary as I had imagined I would (and like we did during language training in orientation), my familiarity with sentence structure has grown considerably, making it easier for me to follow what people say, even though I still have a long ways to go to learn vocabulary. Mostly my language partner has been helping me with reading, which is a great way to learn new words (in the context of a story). As you can see below, normally I copy the short stories or discussion from the grade 3 Khmer language book I have, try to find all the words I know, and get help with the rest from my language partner. The stories are a bit silly sometimes… all about exceptionally studious students, extra helpful kids, and shinning happy people, but it is a good way to learn! For the English part of the lesson, we generally practice conversation.

I think I have learned just as much about Khmer culture during these discussions as she has learned English. We have discussed everything from vehicles to music, gangsters to Cambodian folk tales. I have come to learn that thanks to the cultures we come from, our perspectives on several matters are vastly different. For example, she asked me how many friends I had on Facebook, I replied that I had nearly 500, sounding embarrassed that I had so many and hadn’t cleaned it out in a while. Her look of shock however, was not that I had so many, but so few. She has over 5000 “friends” on facebook. One day, we started talking about beauty. I have already mentioned that people like my nose, but of course they also like my light skin. Nearly every skin care product you buy here has skin whitening properties. I had fun telling her about tanning machines at home. It blew her mind that people would pay money to make their skin darker. I quickly informed her that I was not one of those people, but I certainly don’t mind the tan I have naturally (and inevitably) have acquired here. She also told me that in Mesang high school, there are a lot of gangsters. Gotta watch out for those gangsters! Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think of gangsters, a certain image comes to mind. That image does not fit at all with the bicycle riding, school-uniform wearing, slender, bicycle riding Cambodians that I see heading to school every day in my rural village. I tried to ask her what she meant by gangster. The most I could understand was that they drink a lot (of alcohol) and wear a certain brand of clothing (Monster). At home that would make them troublemakers at best. Now, maybe there is a lot more going on behind the scenes that I don’t see. I would be wrong to judge by appearance alone.  Speaking of appearances, as you know, I get a lot of “hellos” whenever I bike around. However, recently, two people in one day greeted me in Khmer. I was so touched and so happy! Either thought about it enough to realize that after 4 months in Mesang I should know enough to say hello in Cambodian, they are getting used to seeing me around and less shy of me, or best yet, they didn’t think about it and it just came out in Khmer. The last one is my hope! For this year!

I hope you all had a wonderful New Years, and that those of you living in colder places have had time to enjoy the snow!

All the best,

Ma separating rice. She makes it look easy!

I realized that I never put a photo of my all-purpose kroma scarf, so here it is! 

The grade 3 Khmer school book is full of short stories and  dialogues such as this. These stories teach little Cambodian kids how to be nice and share their toys, but teach me vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar! 

Many Cambodians comment on how neat my handwriting is... maybe they never noticed how odiously slow I am at writing. Your writing would be neat too if you had to concentrate on every single line and squiggle. I then translate the story underneath (often literally word for word, so yes, I know the english grammar is not correct), and also write how to pronounce the trickier words.