My new literacy campaign

To follow up on an earlier post, I have learned how to call for help in Khmer, and not a moment too soon. During the same lesson, I also asked Meng Seng Heng, my teacher, if he would begin teaching me to read the Khmer script.  This time, having sensed by now that I'm serious about learning the language and will stick with him through the rough times, Meng was only too happy to oblige.

The man has the patience of a saint.

After Meng's 15-minute introduction to the most basic aspects of the Khmer script, I had the perfect opportunity to practice my latest vocabulary acquisition:  Chooey pong!  Help!  What have I got myself into? Maybe I should have given more thought to migrating to New Zealand.  I could learn to speak Kiwi, and they use the Roman alphabet down there. But no, we're here now, and so I must buckle down and squint at the squiggles. O, so very many squiggles.

Who's this Meng fellow? you may ask. It's true, I started out studying an hour a day, five days a week at the Language Exchange Cambodia (LEC), a 20-minute walk from the house. There I had two teachers: one Monday-Wednesday and another on Thursday and Friday. This system could work because they follow a very regimented programme, so one picked up in the curriculum where the other left off.  Over coffee with my friend Malcolm, however, I mentioned that Ms. M-W consistently arrived 10-20 minutes late for each lesson and then proceeded to complain that she felt tired or unwell, and she never made up for the lost time at the end.  "You need Meng!" Malcolm opined.  Meng does charge a higher price ($10/hour), but he has a university degree in English and is a qualified language teacher. I see Meng only three hours a week, but I find that I'm learning more, faster and better than I did spending five hours at LEC. What's more, although the teaching was one-on-one in both cases, Meng can adjust the speed as he sees fit, because he doesn't have to coordinate with another teacher, so I'm reaping all the benefits of individual training now. Plus, I just like Meng enormously. He's got a wry sense of humour, and he's generous with his encouragement.

Spoken Khmer is only moderately difficult to learn. And by the way, it's pronounced K'my, not K'mare as its spelling would suggest. The phonetics can be a challenge, as there are many sounds foreign to English speakers, and the Cambodians just love their compound consonants.  Malcolm's personal favourite is the word for fat, overweight, heavy:  t'ngun.  He can't manage to say it in the requisite one syllable; I think that's why he goes to the gym so obsessively, hoping to avoid both obesity and using that dratted word. I struggle more with the triphthongs -- the combinations of three vowel sounds rolled into one. They tell me it's possible to say ah-oo-ee in one syllable, but my tongue must be t'ngun, because I can't manage it. The good news is that the syntax is far simpler than in most Indo-European languages -- there's no mucking about with tense or case endings, articles or gender.  

After my first lesson with Meng, I bought a three-ring binder and hole punch, and I dedicated a blank journal that my friends Mark and Sham had given me to my vocabulary notes.  After each class, I organise the notes I'd scribbled hastily in margins, and I plug new words and phrases into the stack of on-line flash cards I'm building. When I was studying at LEC, I arrived for class every day with a growing heap of loose photocopied pages tossed carelessly into my tote bag -- it reflected the somewhat cavalier attitude toward teaching that I sensed there. I flashed back to when I first studied Bahasa Malaysia at the YMCA. That's where I met Rose, a fellow linguist by training and herself a language teacher. Our teacher at the Y was a disaster. Despite speaking Malay as his native tongue, he hadn't a clue about teaching a language to adult learners.  There, too, in 2005, Rose and I arrived for class with loose pages, illegible scribbles in margins, and pens with gnawed ends and little ink. "This is ridiculous!" Rose said. "I'm a  teacher. I know how to be a good student, but I just can't seem to find the motivation to get it together for this class." I'd completely forgotten about that conversation until I looked at my newly organised materials, and I see the difference: I've turned back into the disciplined, motivated, even driven, student that I used to be in my school days. 

Some of the sloppiness reflected the teaching: Meng is highly organised, each lesson cogently laid out with clearly stated objectives, and exercises to practice listening, speaking, reading (Romanised) and writing. LEC was comparatively chaotic and random, and I remember Rose looking at the loose, photocopied nonsense we got at the YMCA and wailing, "Oh, what wouldn't I give for a syllabus!"  

A bigger part of the new regime, though, is my own desire to learn and to learn well. I'm still pondering this. I've studied a number of languages over the years with varying levels of enthusiasm. Turkish introduced me to the lovely concept of vowel harmony, and unlike the country itself, the language is a marvel of logic and consistency. I studied German all through my school years with something between diligence and fondness. I loved reading Mann and Hesse in the original, but ironically, I've never been to a German-speaking country. My experience of learning French merely cemented my already chronic Francophobia, but I had a blast picking up some Spanish before a trip to Argentina and speaking it there. After living in Malaysia for ten years, I should have been fluent in the official language, but I never moved past the functional level, if that. Now I am working intensely and joyfully to learn Khmer. 

Although I got off to a bad start learning Malay, I never came around and made a better effort as I'm doing here. For one thing, I was never able to find a better place or way to learn:  Rose and I both tried to find a more effective class or teacher, and we came up with nothing. Even the local universities at that time were offering Malay classes only for their full-time students, and other places, like YMCA, refused to reveal anything about their teachers' qualifications or experience, and we were loath to pay for another expensive course only to have it turn out as badly. Second, Malaysia is multi-cultural, and I lived in an area that was predominantly home to Indian- and Chinese-Malaysians. Many of them simply didn't speak Malay; others could but preferred English. As the relations between the ethnic groups grow ever more strained, the Malays holding the political power by dubious means, the inclination to embrace the Malay language dwindles daily. Many years ago, then Prime Minister Mahathir decreed that the language previously known as Bahasa Melayu (language of the Malays) would be known henceforth as Bahasa Malaysia (language of Malaysia). That was a nice bit of window-dressing, Mr. PM, but your racially divisive policies have ensured that the non-Malays will never embrace BM as their own national language, and that is a disincentive for non-Malaysians to learn the language, as well. I remember so many instances of Malays lighting up when I spoke the official language in a way that the Indians and Chinese did not. Clearly, they did not consider it their language. 

Khmer is Cambodia's only language, and far fewer Cambodians than Malaysians speak English. I could survive here without learning the language, but I would feel miserably confined to an expat ghetto. One blogger said she'd gone a bit beyond the part of Phnom Penh that caters to foreigners and was mortified that she couldn't ask a tuktuk driver to take her home. She promptly began her Khmer studies. So yes, need is the mother of determination as well as invention. That's one factor. When I try to speak Khmer, the response has been mostly warm and encouraging, the Cambodians happily correcting my pronunciation and waiting patiently while I cobble a sentence together. Is Khmer a pretty language?  Well, no, at least not to my ears, but it's not so ugly as to discourage me (which is why I never tried to learn Tamil). I question the degree to which a foreigner will ever be able to assimilate in Cambodia, but not learning the language will definitely relegate you to the periphery, and at the moment, that's plenty of incentive for me.  

And boy, do I need it!  (Those of you who aren't especially interested in linguistics may want to sneak out of this post now. I won't mind.)  

The Khmer script is an alphasyllabary, which Wikipedia helpfully defines as "a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit:  each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel-marking is absent or optional..."  

Khmer has 33 consonants, which fall into two groups, each group having its own characteristics and behaviours. 

The vowels are where the fun starts. There are 24 vowels, plus 14 "extra vowels", presumably because 24 isn't enough to drive the foreigners out of the country in despair.  "Oh, don't worry about the extra vowels for now," Meng chuckles, implying that we'll be dealing with vowels for months, nay years to come.  Get this, though: a vowel may appear to the left or right of the syllable's consonant, or above or below it.  Better still, pieces of the vowel may appear in any of those locations.  

Here are a mere eight of the vowels and how they appear
in relation to the consonant, which is
represented by the square.

Best of all, the same vowel will have a different sound, depending upon whether it's paired with a consonant from Group 1 or Group 2.  "Oh, well, wait..." says Meng.  "Three of them don't change -- they sound the same all the time."  It takes him a moment to locate the three consistently voiced vowels on the chart which fills a whole page.

Despite having vowels which twine like ivy around the consonants, leaving a new reader to wonder which goes with what, Khmer does not see fit to put spaces between syllables or words. No, the text is also littered with a vast supply of diacritical and punctuation marks to make things... ahem... clearer.

I've never tried to learn a logographic writing system -- Chinese, say -- and I wonder how it would compare. The Khmer script is different enough from my own alphabet in both form and function to feel very strange indeed. In the end, though, I think and hope it will be worth the effort. Although it's been interesting to learn a new language solely by aural means, it's been limiting, as well. I hope that seeing words in the native script will improve my pronunciation. I can't always distinguish between two similar-sounding phonemes when I hear them, and ten people may write the same word ten different ways in the Roman script. 

So if you ever sit back and wonder what I'm up to, you can reasonably assume that I am, and will be for the foreseeable future, studying Khmer. 

Choeung Ek

This is a tough post to write, because today's road trip was a tough one to make.  In more ways than one, it turns out.

Choeung Ek is about 15km outside Phnom Penh.  We had about three hours of heavy rain last night, and the road to Choeung Ek -- or half of it, anyway -- is under construction, so while those driving into the city rolled along on pavement, those of us in the outbound lane plowed through mud. At some points I wondered if Seiha, his tuktuk and both of us in the back would simply vanish into a murky pothole, never to be seen again.

Choeung Ek was once a fruit orchard, and it's once more a green and pleasant break from the city, but it's also the site of the Cambodian Genocide Memorial.  This two-hectare orchard is pocked with the now-excavated mass graves of nearly 9,000 Cambodians whom the Khmer Rouge bludgeoned to death with farm implements, pieces of wood or bamboo, or in the case of infants, simply bashed against the trunk of a massive tree (bullets being too costly) in this, one of the country's 300-odd killing fields. 25% of Cambodia's population perished under the Khmer Rouge -- one person in four died of illness, starvation, or murder.

My new friend, Deanne, is volunteering as a CPA for an NGO in the city, and we decided that we would make this trip together. She visited Toul Sleng, the former high school turned interrogation prison, last week, and I had been through it twice before in years past. I'd toured Toul Sleng when I was in Phnom Penh for a short time, and it left me too emotionally devastated to even consider going out to Choeung Ek. I believe, however, that anyone who wants to live in this country for any significant amount of time (like, say, more than a month) should go to both of these sites. You simply cannot comprehend what this country suffered in the years 1975-1979 and the impact it had upon the survivors and the subsequent generation unless you do.

There has been some grumbling that the Cambodian government gave a concession to run the Choeung Ek Memorial to a Japanese company.  It hardly feels like an overly commercialised venture, though -- the audio tour was outstanding:  Thought-provoking, informative and dignified, yet far from flat, and it included testimony from a few who survived the Pol Pot regime, as well as from a couple of cadres who participated in the executions at Choeung Ek. The audio tour allowed visitors to move around the site at their own pace, pausing to look, to reflect, to cry, to pray.  The narrator quietly noted, "This is a memorial site. Please dress modestly, speak quietly, and do not smoke during your visit."  No, I think the Japanese company has set exactly the right tone.

It took us about two hours to tour the site. As we started, I happened to notice a lizard perched on a flowering shrub, and I paused the audio player to look at it, then to photograph it. I knew what was ahead of us, and it seemed like a gift to spend a few minutes with something living and beautiful.

Although the wooden buildings that stood on the site at the time of the executions are now gone, the narration explained where each stood and what purpose it served.

Dozens of mass graves have been excavated; others, now filled with lake water, will be left alone.  Knowing that almost 9,000 people were killed there, Deanne marvelled that the area is relatively small -- they dug most of the mass graves to a depth of 15 feet. Skulls and the larger bones were removed from the graves, and they underwent thorough DNA testing and cataloguing in the past decade. Smaller bones were left behind, and many still surface during the rainy season, as do fragments of cloth, refusing to remain silently buried.

Some of the mass graves are simply open pits, and visitors walk around the rims; others are surrounded by bamboo post fences. We paused at one to listen to the audio narration, which happened to be the testimony of a young man who survived the dark years in rural villages, then managed to walk to Thailand, from where a refugee organisation flew him to Texas. The thought of that journey made my head spin. As he spoke of the psychological scars, he expressed gratitude for his survival (most of his family perished) and for his life since his escape, but he added, "I am damaged. I am like a broken glass...  yes, like a broken glass."  I looked at the woven bracelets that Cambodians have left on the bamboo staves of the fence surrounding the mass grave, and as I looked down, a broken pair of glasses lay at my feet. So many Cambodians are still broken glasses. It's purely impossible to come through horrors like this unscathed. As a mere visitor, I found it ghastly that some 30 years on, rainstorms still produce harvests of bones.

A gorgeous tree still standing in the middle of all the mass graves once held loudspeakers which blasted the Party's anthems at night, powered by a diesel generator. To those nearby, it probably sounded like a Khmer Rouge meeting, but the purpose of the music was to drown out the screams of those being executed by very crude methods. And Pol Pot's many slogans provided lyrics for these anthems -- gems such as:

• There is no gain in keeping you; there is no loss in weeding you out.
• Better to arrest ten innocent people by mistake than to free a single guilty party.
• He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse.
• If you wish to live exactly as you please, the Angkar (the State) will put aside a small piece of land for you.

The skulls and larger bones which were removed from the mass graves are now housed in a tall stupa:  17 levels of skulls, organised by the approximate ages of the victims. You can shed your shoes and enter the stupa. It has all the hushed sanctity of a shrine, but unlike a cathedral which houses the relics of saints, this shrine houses the remains of 9,000 murder victims. I found myself wondering, which would be worse -- never knowing what had happened to a loved one, or knowing that his or her skull is now on display here?  Still, despite the gruesome contents, the stupa -- the whole site, in fact -- feels serene today. If this memorial had never been established, it would be quite easy to forget about the slaughter that took place here. And once again, you will never understand Cambodians in 2014 (especially those of my age and older) if you don't know what happened here in 1974.

When I told him that I was going to Choeung Ek today, Meng, my 57 year-old Khmer teacher simply said, "It is a very sad place."

Khmer parrot

There are parrots on record with over 1000-word vocabularies.  My new Khmer teacher (more on him shortly) tells me that we're aiming for 3000 words.

At the moment, I can rattle off about 350 words and phrases, in addition to numbers. I'm still struggling with the numbers but picking up speed every day. I know my word count because I've been using on-line flash cards to study.  The StudyStack web site has pre-made stacks of flash cards on a variety of topics, but unsurprisingly, they had none to practice Romanised Khmer vocabulary. So I've been making up my own cards as I go; the software allows me to display either side of the cards, to shuffle, and to re-try those that I missed the first time through.  I find it a really helpful little tool.

Umm, yes, that would be a good one to have. [note for next lesson]

A friend asked me in an email this morning if I'm able to practice much, and the answer is, not really. I practice of course with my teacher, and the two cats are getting tired of being addressed in Khmer. I can ask Seiha the tuktuk driver to pick me up here or there at a certain time, and I do use Khmer whenever I can, but honestly -- a 350-word vocabulary is very limiting.

I could pick up more vocabulary on my own time, but I'm hindered by the incredibly bad quality of the English-[Romanised] Khmer dictionaries I've come across. All of my Khmer teachers have told me to toss out the dictionary and phrase-book I'd picked up. Some of their translations are obscure -- seldom used or understood -- and others are patently wrong.  

Again, I bump into the limitations that come with being unable to read the Khmer script. I can't pick up vocabulary from reading signs, menus, or notices, and when I hear an unfamiliar Khmer word, I have no way to look it up. Reading Romanised Khmer is just vexing, because every individual transliterates differently, and I find the same word spelled variously even in my teacher's own materials.  

Besides asking Meng the word for Help!, I need to ask when he thinks I might reasonably begin to learn the script. In the meantime, I'll continue my learning parrot-style.

Light show in the night sky

The past couple of nights, I've noticed what looks like a disco strobe-light effect in the sky. Tonight I went up onto the roof and watched it for an hour or so. If it were more stable and multi-coloured, I'd liken it to the aurora borealis.

The swath of sky to the east-northeast  is constantly fluttering with light, and there are occasional flashes of distinct lightning bolts -- some big horizontal slashes, some five-pronged forks, a few that look like Khmer letters (ឈ).

Oddly, I can hear only a very occasional and very distant rumble of thunder. Is this what they call heat lightning?

We're moving from the hot dry season to the hot rainy season, which is a south-western monsoon. Is that part of the explanation why I see all this activity in the northeastern sky?

Never mind. It's peaceful on the roof, with a gentle breeze, listening to the alto voice of the woman singing at the live-music restaurant down the street, the occasional little motorbike puttering by.

Khnumbers

I've had 13 one-hour Khmer lessons now.  I can meet and greet, discuss family, occupational skills, daily activities and the weather. I know my colours, dates and days, and I can tell time. In theory, I can bargain at the market. As of this afternoon, I can inform you in Khmer that I did laundry and made pickles this morning.

Prek nih, khnyom twer cherook bon-lai.  

Speaking at a normal pace is still a problem. I am Queen of the Ellipsis:  Khnyom... som... sooah... mooey... ... ... bahn-eh!  ("I would like to ask a question", but by the time I finish the sentence, the listener has either dozed off or walked away.)

This is my first experience learning a language that doesn't use the Roman alphabet, and unfortunately, there is no standard for Romanising Khmer.  What you see above is my effort to transliterate what I'm hearing my teachers say. So, you ask, why don't I just learn the Khmer script? Because it's a beastly task. I'll probably have a go at it at some point, but I need to attain a certain level of spoken fluency first.  If you don't believe me when I say that learning the Khmer script is daunting, please just check out the "notable features" bullet points on the Omniglot page.

Many of the basic conversations, of course, involve numbers.  How old are you? What time do you eat breakfast? How much does a kilo of avocados cost?  It's quite common to ask someone's age in order to address them correctly.  Khmers will address someone as older sister or brother, younger sister or brother, aunt, uncle, etc., rather than using the person's proper name, or even the 3rd-person pronoun.  Example:  Instead of telling the younger bank clerk, "Wah, your new eyeglasses are cool!", I would say, "Wah, younger sister's new eyeglasses are cool!"  [Note: this did not result in any discount on the damned exorbitant bank fees.]  It is also quite common, my teacher informs me, to ask about someone's salary and to treat her with greater respect if it's higher than your own. I find this appalling and plan to feign ignorance should anyone ask me how much money I have. Some local customs just aren't worth adopting, I say.

It's not simply that there are some numbers I don't wish to discuss. My brain seizes when it comes to Khmer numbers in general.

Numbers are numbers -- how hard can it be?

0-5 are no problem.  Beyond 5, there is arithmetic required, and I am arithmetically challenged. I am in fact totally innumerate.

In Khmer, the word for 6 is 5+1, 7 is 5+2, and so on through 9.  So when I hear the Khmer word for 9, it takes me a moment to translate the 5 and the 4, then another instant to add them.  The textbook way to say 9 is prahm-booun (five-four), but to make matters worse, no one actually says prahm-booun.  They abbreviate it to m'booun.  Six weeks in this country, and I show no sign of being able to distinguish between booun and m'booun, especially when they're rattled off quickly by a tuktuk driver in a rainstorm or a harried mango seller. In short, 6-9 sound exactly like 1-4 to my ear.  

I am rarely an apologist for English, which I think is one of the world's most fiendish languages to learn, but it does behave sensibly when it comes to numbers.  You can readily see the link between the single-digit numerals and their multiple of 10:  two - twenty; three - thirty; four - forty, etc.  That link does not exist in Khmer:  bpii - m'pei (2 - 20); bei - sahmseup (3 - 30); booun - saehseup (4 - 40), etc.  So when I want to tell someone my age, I must first conjure up the word for fifty (which is totally unrelated to the number five) and add 2.  When I turn 56, I'll have to add 5 and 1, or lie about my age for the next few years.  (Actually, if I can't say 53 smoothly and confidently in Khmer before my next birthday, I'll just hang it up and declare myself a deaf-mute.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the local currency is the riel, and 4000 riel = USD1. Many sellers in the markets quote prices in riel, and the electric bill comes denominated in riel.  So now, in addition to having to translate the number-words in my head, I also have to do the arithmetic to convert the riel to dollars. When presented with the price per kilo by a fruit merchant or with the electric bill by my landlady (who speaks no English), I want to crawl under my bed like a spaniel in a thunderstorm. The numeric verbiage streams from these women's mouths in paragraphs.  

Khmer has words for one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, and one million. My electric bill last month was 97,500 riel.  In English, we say that as 97 thousand, 5 hundred. To express the same number in Khmer, you say 9 ten-thousands, 7 thousand, 5 hundred. And, of course, that really means they're saying 5+4 ten-thousands, 5+2 thousand, 5 hundred. Yee, when she noticed my eyes rolling back in my head, showed me the bill and let me read the number for myself. Otherwise I'd be sitting here in the dark, having been unable to translate the amount before the due date. (They tell me the electric company is very quick to cut off power if the payment is late.)  

I am tremendously motivated to learn Khmer, and I know I'm being impatient. A few months from now, when I aim to rattle off numbers like a Cambodian croupier, I hope I'll look back on this post, read the frustration in it and feel a sense of accomplishment.  

What I miss about living in KL

I've made a very conscious effort to be optimistic about living in the Phenomenal Penguin -- focusing on the positives without being a total Pollyanna about it.  Although it's only a two-hour flight from KL, Cambodia is a very different world, and, as I had expected, there are some marked advantages to living here, and there are some Malaysian things that I sorely miss.

Public transit:  Most Malaysians complain bitterly about the public transit in KL. I pine for it. Phnom Penh has no public transit whatever; we have tuktuks and motos. I won't hire a moto driver to take me anywhere, because most of them drive like madmen, and it's simply too risky, especially without a helmet. There is an unspoken three-tier price structure for the tuktuks:  local, expat, and tourist.  By speaking some Khmer, by using familiar drivers when possible and by negotiating aggressively with others, I can at least get a ride for less than a tourist would pay, but there's no such thing as a fixed fare -- the best I can hope for is a mutually acceptable price based upon time and distance.

Last week, Seiha, a friendly tuktuk driver who often parks on my street, drove me to Lucky Supermarket and back. It took about an hour in all -- 15 minutes each way in transit, and a half hour of shopping. He charged me $4 (RM13).  I think that's reasonable, but I can't help but contrast it with the RM2 return fare on a RapidKL bus from Brickfields to MidValley, paid with my nifty little Touch'n'Go card.

Cambodia imports all its petroleum products, and there is certainly no government subsidy for fuel. The average price for a litre of petrol is $1.30 (RM4.30)/litre, so of course it's going to cost more to get around by motor.

O, how I loved RapidKL.

Shopping:  One of the things I adored about living in KL was shopping at the pasar pagi (morning market). The ladies at the tables where I routinely bought my produce charged me the same prices as they charged my Malaysian neighbours, and they threw in free cooking tips in the bargain. In the Cambodian markets, whether I'm shopping for food, housewares, clothing, bicycle lock, or towels, I find that the sellers will most often try to charge me far more than I would pay in a supermarket or fixed-price store, sometimes doubling the price. The few times I've gone back later and tried to negotiate, saying that mint or chicken livers are half that price in the supermarket, they either shrug and turn away or drop their price just a wee bit.  This morning I thought I'd buy some fruit from an older lady who's selling mangos and bananas in her doorway on a street I walk daily. I ended up buying a kilo of mangos from her at nearly double the supermarket price, and no -- despite her assurances to the contrary, they are not better.  My preference is always to buy from individual merchants and small businesses, but I'm not willing to pay a 100% surcharge to support the little guy.  

"Hey, sister! Got tau geh today! Very good. You want?"

The social mix:  This one is too complex to be tidily summed up, but in brief,  KL is a social hodge-podge, with both Malaysians and non-Malaysians crossing all manner of racial and cultural lines. There is a broad socio-economic spectrum. I was blessed to form deep friendships with some Anglophone Malaysians. I would never claim that this group of friends was truly representative of Malaysians as a whole, because the majority doesn't speak English, and I speak no Indian languages or Chinese dialects and only functional Malay. Most of my friends in KL had studied or travelled outside of Malaysia, and we found common ground in many areas.

It's still to early to know for sure, but my visceral sense is that there are only few delineations in Cambodian society, and that they are much harder to breach.  First, the line between Khmers and foreigners -- all foreigners:  Yes, some Cambodians speak some English, and with time, some foreigners learn Khmer (and damn, I'm trying hard!), but in addition to the linguistic divide, there is a cultural gulf. Few Cambodians have left the Kingdom, and many have never been outside their home provinces. Poverty is rife, except where there is staggering wealth. There is a middle class -- I think my landlady and her family are part of it -- but it's a small piece of the economic pie. I'm certainly not ruling out the possibility that I will form friendships with Cambodians, and I ardently want to, but I believe it's going to take more time than it did in KL.

Culture-blind :-)

Food:  Ok, Malaysians, you win. It's really, really hard to find better food anywhere else in southeast Asia. I miss KL's hawker stalls and streetside food. I miss going over to Lavanya in the Brickfields alley and eating a heaping plate of rice and vegetables for under RM5.  I miss the variety of Malaysian food.

There are of course street stalls here in Phnom Penh, but the sellers almost never speak any English, and I don't yet have enough Khmer vocabulary to ask what they're selling.  An adventurous omnivore would just order something and make the best of it, but being vegetarian, I really want to know if there's some part of a dead animal on my plate. It's going to be a while till I can plop down on a bench with the locals for a bowl of noodle and [????] soup, and even then, I wonder if they'll charge me the sort of price I'd pay to sit in an air-conditioned restaurant with a menu in English.

The real catastrophe, however, is the durian. Cambodians sell the same big, odourless and flavourless durians as the Thais do. They open them long before they're ripe, when the flesh is still crunchy. You know it's a lost cause when they let the durian sellers sit in the middle of the phsar with everyone else. I've never seen a No Durian sign in a Phnom Penh hotel. It's a travesty.

If you can't smell it from at least 500m,
it's not a good durian. 

P. S.  I hope it goes without saying that I miss my KL friends more than all the above.

Beautiful Shoes, Part 2

I went back to Beautiful Shoes this afternoon to pick up my new, custom-made sandals.

So, you ask, are they beautiful?*

* These are not my shoes --
they merely turned up in a Google search for
'beautiful shoes'.

Pulleeeeze!  I couldn't get down my spiral staircase in these heels, never mind climbing in and out of a tuktuk without breaking my neck. And on the bamboo bicycle...?  We think not.

You must understand that Phnom Penh is not pedestrian friendly. You can come to a graceless and grievous end, even wearing flats.

Photo credit to a fellow blogger:
 http://travelmoments.net/category/cambodia/phnom-penh/

No. My new shoes are not beautiful. They are, however, beautifully made and divinely comfortable. The shoemaker adjusted each of the four straps to fit my asymmetrical feet and assured me that I could return in the next couple of weeks for further adjustments if necessary.  

So I would encourage all of you who are planning a visit to Phnom Penh to start looking at photos or thinking of dearly departed shoes which you might like to replace. If you want faux Jimmy Choos or men's tango shoes, bring photos and flip through the sample materials. They do goofy shoes, too. 

I'll be interested to see how long these shoes suffer the abuse I dish out. How many kilometers can I get out of $20?  On the other hand, if they do start to pull apart, I know where to take them for repair.

A new friend is having a very stylish pair of fisherman's sandals made in a shade hovering between oxblood and plum. Quite a bit more intricate, but still only $25.  It occurs to me that, for the first time in decades, I can be frivolous and consider buying a pair of shoes that is not black. Sensible, ground-gripping ballerina flats in turquoise, say! That's about as much frivolity as I can manage. 

Kitchen nostalgia

Retronaut just posted this vintage advertisement, and although I found the image of the pigs throwing themselves head-first into the Universal Food Chopper vaguely disturbing, I simultaneously felt a pang of nostalgia. My reaction echoed in many of the comments:  "Awwww, my mother had one of those!"

Funny how such a prosaic kitchen implement sent my mind rocketing back to the 1960s. I can see my mother in the kitchen, grinding up corned beef, potatoes and carrots for hash. Like the cars of that decade, the Universal grinder was big, heavy and rock-solid. Indestructible. 

The articles about making raw pet food all recommend one brand of electric grinder or another, simultaneously warning buyers to review the warranty terms carefully, because some of them will not cover breakage caused by grinding bones (an essential BARF ingredient).  One article suggests investing in a good pair of earplugs to block the din of grinding.  After a few moments of consideration, what popped into my head?  The image of my mother's Universal grinder. I don't remember it generating any undue noise, and it could probably crunch up those electric grinders with their limited warranty cards. 

I was surprised and thrilled to find something even close to the Universal grinder when I got to Phnom Penh. Its design isn't as stylish as its American cousin's, but it's just as bullet-proof.  It came with no warranty card, because it's perfectly obvious it will outlive its buyer and several generations thereafter.

One was made in the fine old industrial city of New Britain, Connecticut, and the other in Moscow.  In the 1960s, no one in our town would have bought a Russian meat grinder, made by those godless Communists! Back then, my schoolmates and I crouched under our desks during bomb drills on the theory that we would somehow fare better there when the Russians launched a nuclear attack. And that seemed even less far-fetched than the idea that I would one day live in Cambodia and buy a meat grinder made in Moscow.