here, i will teach you some (and i wont even charge you the pro-rated cost of my $5/hour lessons..... youre welcome.)
Hello!
Sooa-s'day!
Two thousand (you have to use this one a lot)
Bee poen
Turn on the light.
Butt plug.*
She has pretty skin.
Goatt + saat + sahat. = Her meat is pretty.
These are cool:
cow (trousers) + ow (shirt) = cow ow (clothes)
au poke (dad) + madai (mom) = au poke madai (parents)
khmao (black) + dai (hand) = khmao dai (pencil)
dtoo (cabinet) + teck gaw (ice) = dtoo teck gaw (refrigerator)
so so interesting and fun. i have made so many mistakes. i am a total dumbass on a regular basis.
after teaching sexual health to teens for awhile and learning not to blush, now apparently living in another country and learning the language is teaching me to not really get embarrassed at all. they laugh at me all the time at work. i try to construct a simple sentence, and they are like, "Sister Amy! You ate the restaurant?!" -- and they say it in English - which I KNOW THEY CAN SPEAK, then they just giggle at me for hours. they do all this, of course, in the most loving way possible. they are most encouraging and sweet to me all the time, even when theyre taking the piss -- oh! and thats another thing thats happening -- im learning British English, and quite by accident.
making fun of
taking the piss
bandaid
plaster
silly
daft (i get that one a lot)
there are so many stories to tell of this past wonderful weekend trip to Rabbit Island, near Kep on the coast. it was preceded by a humiliating and uncommonly painful bikini wax, which i will not share about at this time. no worries, mates (that means 'friends' in British) -- all is well below deck, but it was touch-n-go there for a couple of days.
i threw up again on Saturday morning. this is no surprise to anyone, im sure. least of all ME, who is the one who does all the actual throwing up here in SE Asia. there are few things in life that make you wish for diarrhea, but the frequency and intensity with which i vomit is one of the rare ones.
so, im on the side of the road barfing up breakfast, 10 km from the FERRY that we have to take to the island, wishing i had packed more plastic vomit bags, and halfheartedly waggling a weak-handed wave at two stoic, curious local preteen blokes, when - wouldnt you know it? - out of the roadside pond in front of me comes a 90 year old woman - dripping with bog water, to sell me the crabs she had just caught. i was trying, with a combination of fake vomiting gestures and genuine retching sounds, to explain to her that i was a bit sick at the moment, and also didnt have any money on me as i was currently, as i mentioned to you before, here gagging on my hands and knees by the side of the road in rural Cambodia.
as soon as she had come, she disappears back into the bog -- and then, wouldnt you know it, back again to help me out some more! at this point she proceeds to start digging her knuckles into my back, so much so that she is really visibly flexing her impressively lithe biceps. the last, i repeat - THE LAST - thing i want is for someone, anyone, to touch me when im throwing up.
my friend Sinead (Bonnie, i am forever indebted to you for the introduction!!), who has been dutifully offering me napkins and comforting words, is now trying to help by taking photos of what i have come to realize is some anti-nausea massage cure.
the nonagenarian angel of mercy has now moved around to my front, squatting in front of me and pinching large chunks of chest skin and twisting them, leaving red welts in a line across my chest. if i hadnt been there and was hearing this for the first time, i would think that this was some sort of scare-someone-and-theyll-stop-hiccuping trick, but i WAS there, and i was simply enamored by her insistence, audacity and the fact that she was talking to me nonstop in Khmer, and just smiling away.
[hopefully there are photos forthcoming. will post soon...]
shortest bout of Asian vomiting ever, people. no kidding. that was it. i threw up one more time on the way to the ferry dock, and then got on the boat and was fine. totally fine. rested for awhile, and then participated in the collective oral destruction of 3 kilos of crabs, caught off the island, and about as many beers.
around midnight, there was phosphorescence in the waves, and we all got in in our clothes and just danced around in the fairywater. amazing......
best finds of late:
headline from the Cambodia Daily, 14 May:
"'Abducted' Councilor Actually Just Went Home"
and from a menu at a Riverside restaurant:
"Vegetarian Calzone: Deep fried porked pizza, filled with tomatoes sauce, mozzeralla, onion, green pepper."
(*no shit - and no pun intended there.)
Still waiting for those pictures...
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