Not a Baltimore address

I recently moved into a new apartment. For reasons I won't bore you with, I only plan on staying there for three months. It's a nice enough place, but a bit out of the way by Phnom Penh standards. One day traffic was particularly bad and it took me almost fifteen minutes to get to work!

One my American colleagues who lives in the same building pointed out the irony in our address. Most of the streets here have a number and a name. The street number is 245. The street name is Mao Tse-Toung.

I am living on a street named after Chairman Mao.

You know, the guy who starved 60 million of his own people to death during the Great Leap Forward? I know we're all big fans. It was another one of those moments when I took a mental step back and realized how things that are so different from home have become normal.

It could be worse. I could be living on Kim Il-Sung (Street 289). I don't think there is a Stalin Street.

The street names are vestiges of Cambodia's fairly recent communist past. My street is one of the biggest thoroughfares in the city. (For the folks back home, think of Charles Street or Pratt Street.) This makes sense since you can make a convincing argument that, due to the amount of development and financial aid, China owns Cambodia.

The city is almost completely flat. It tickles me to no end that the highest point in town, Wat Phnom, is a 30-meter high hill. And it's man-made. When they paved the streets here they give exactly zero thought to grading. Maybe they don't worry about it because they assume it's not a problem given the flat terrain. What's more likely is they just don't think about it at all.

A friend of mine told me about how when he first moved here he got what he thought was a great deal on a house. He signed the lease in the dry season. When the rainy season rolled around the street was always under a foot of water. It was a great house. He just couldn't get in or out. I had been warned, then, that one thing to ask about when renting a new place was flooding. Surely this wouldn't be a problem on one of the city's main streets...

Last night I had plans for my usual Saturday night out. A big storm rolled through, so I had to wait out the rain. I also had to wait for the floods to subside. I'm living on one of the biggest streets in the city and there was over a foot of water.

Here's the kicker: It was just my block! From the balcony I could see in both directions. I could see the street past the traffic lights on each corner. Past the traffic lights? No water. In front of my apartment? The Amazon. It would have taken just a few truckloads of dirt to bring the block up to grade, had anyone bothered to think about it.

I had to roll up my pants, ride my moto in flip-flops and then change into grown-up shoes when I got to the night club, all just to drive through one flooded block. Ah, life in Southeast Asia...

I certainly don't mean to imply that this is a catastrophe or major hardship. You know if you live in Southeast Asia that you will have to deal with rain and flooding. Cambodia doesn't have to deal with earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, or tornadoes. Every once in a while I'm mildly inconvenienced when I want to go out. I can live with that. On Mao Tse Toung Street.

Me no want massah

I've written a lot about one of the love/hate features of Sihanoukville, the beach town here: the army of people selling on the beach, mostly children. I usually go to the beach alone so I enjoy talking to the kids. Sometimes it gets to be a bit much. With most of them I can say, "I want quiet now. Come see me later, OK?" Most of them respond to kindness in kind.

The ones I simply can't bear are the older women who give massages and manicures. Or "massah" as they say here. There are dozens of them. Their rate of success is very close to zero. They simply will not leave you alone or take no for an answer. I have been to the beach so many times that the people who work there know me. I'm not bragging. It's simple math. You spend a hundred days on the beach or whatever and people learn your face.

I can generally get rid of the people selling fruit or bracelets or sunglasses or whatever with a smile and a simple "ottay awkun" (literally "no, thank you"). However, every day I'm on the beach I have the following conversation literally dozens of times. I see the woman walking towards me so I smile and shake my head no. This should be enough. But no.

You want massah?
Ottay awkun.
Massah very good.
Ottay awkun.
Cut nail?
Ottay.
Cut nail very nice?
Ottay.
Ooh, your nail so long.
No.
Why you no want cut nail?
I am trying to be nice here.
I do foot massah very good.
Why are we still having this conversation?
I come back later?
No?
Later I cut nail.
No.
I come back later you get massah.
No.
You help me. Today no business.

And so on. The reason "today no business" is always the same. There are more massah ladies than tourists! I always cut my nails before going to the beach in a vain attempt to avoid these conversations. Maybe next time I will take a pair of pliers and rip them out at the root. It wouldn't help.

You want me massah your raw, bleeding toe pads? Massah raw bleeding toe pads very nice.

I am single, heterosexual man of somewhat advanced age. Why on God's Green Earth would I pay someone to cut my nails?! As for massah... I don't like massah. Because my back problems are structural and not muscular, massah actually makes me feel worse. Plus, these women aren't masseuses. All they do is apply various ointments from the local convenience store. Having someone rub skin lotion and SAND into my skin in the blazing tropical heat sounds absolutely awful to me. I don't know why anyone would want that.

As a western man I have quite a bit of hair on my body except, of course, on the one place where I actually want it, on my head. The massah ladies also remove hair. That's fine if you're a lady.

Here they do it by twisting a piece of string into a sort of figure-eight and rubbing it over the skin. The string literally rips the hair out. It hurts like hell. They use talcum powder to lessen the discomfort but it doesn't help much. Here my friend Ato is having this done to her legs. Phea, the girl in the bottom left corner, is the one officially doing it. But whenever someone on the beach makes a score it inevitably draws a crowd. A group of young girls gathered to help and watch.


There are an equal number of kids watching from behind Ato. The little girl in the headband is Srey Oun, one of the three little girls who gave me the Christmas present. Behind her and Phea are two sisters who I believe are identical twins. Their names are Beyonce and Rihanna. Or so they say... I honestly don't know which is which. They both answer to both names. They both sell fruit. If you buy from one you have to buy from the other. Not a good business model.

One quick side note: I met Phea on my first trip here, about two years ago (!!). When I met her she was severely cross-eyed. Then she wasn't. Then she was. I asked the other girls and they said that she has "bad days" when she wakes up cross-eyed and "good days" when she does not. I would have thought they were joking but I have seen it for myself.

So how does this procedure feel? Look at Ato's face as Phea works on her armpit.


Why would anyone pay for this? Here is To looking slightly less pained but still praying for the ordeal to end.

Fail!

If you are looking for a funny website to waste half a day look here. Hilarious. I submitted some photos to them. Here's the story:

At my school they installed a privacy partition in the men's room. There are two urinals so I guess someone was concerned about someone else watching them pee. This wouldn't be high on my list of changes to make at the school, but whatever. However, the maintenance guys were apparently a little unclear on the concept. Someone told them to put a partition on the wall next to the urinal and, dadgumit, they did it.


What makes it even funnier is that the bathroom is quite small and is off a hallway. A classroom is directly opposite. There is a door, but when the door is open this is what you see.


I took this photo from the hallway. The door in the back is the toilet. There's another one on the other side of the sink. The locks are broken on both doors, so if you're sitting there you have to be vigilant and make sure no one rips open the door while you're doing your business. Otherwise, people (students) in the hallway can see you.

So, to recap, one guy watching another guy pee is a problem. What is not a problem, apparently, is that little girls in the hallway have a straight line of sight into the both toilets and both urinals. Note that the partition does nothing to help this particular issue, either.

Trouble maker

Let's play a game. Which of these is not like the other one?


This is one of my classes taking their final exam. One of my students was a Buddhist monk. How cool is that. It was my second class with him.

He was such a pain in the ass. Always talking on his celphone, flirting with the girls, picking fights with other boys in the hallway and talking back to me.

I am joking of course. He's a Buddhist monk. It's difficult to describe him without falling into cliche, but he truly was the most pleasant, nicest and hardest working student. An absolute joy to have in the classroom.

I will miss this class. It's a class for students who failed grammar and/or writing and/or reading in the previous term. Some of them are here because they're spoiled, lazy knuckleheads who don't give a crap. I will no doubt see some of them next term. One girl in this class failed it for the third time. This term she missed 17 of 20 classes. Last term she missed 14 of 20. This isn't math class, but the numbers make it pretty clear what the problem is.

As you can see most of the other students were teenagers. Most of them are not knuckleheads. They are good students with poor test-taking skills. I drill them mercilessly on how to take a test. Anyone who knew me as a child knew that I was something of a savant when it came to taking tests. My scores on the GRE were so high I actually called Princeton to make sure they were right. I am an inexperienced teacher and my grammar knowledge is weak but one thing I can teach is how to take a test.

The monk's name is Korng Kheourng. In Cambodia the family name comes first, so his given name is Kheourng. The spelling might seem a bit, well, overdone to an English speaker, but there are 60 distinct vowel sounds in Khmer, more than any other language. I would spell it Kung, but that doesn't give a sense of the little nooks and crannies of the vowel sound. Most transliterations are British English, not American, so the 'r' is the soft British 'r'. The American spelling would be more like Kheouhng. There. Now you still can't pronounce it!

(One more example of the complexities of the language: Behind Kheourng is a boy named Ly Hour. Behind him are two girls, Kaneka and Kannika. To me the names look the same but apparently they are pronounced differently. Luckily, Kaneka asked me to called her Ka, thus saving us all a bit of confusion.)

I was hoping to get a photo with Kheourng on the last day of class. His attendance was perfect. The only day he missed was the last day! That's why I am using this surreptitious photo I took during the exam. He sent me an email thanking me for helping him pass. I assured him that he didn't need to thank me, that he passed because he did the work. But I still got a little verklempt.

I should note that I get emails and facebook messages from other students as well. One of the many reasons I like my job. In Baltimore, by way of contrast, students thank you by not shooting you.

Overcrowding of classrooms is a problem in virtually any school. Here you can see we have 23 students crammed into a space big enough for a hamster. This led to a cultural lesson for me. At the beginning of the term I had them do an exercise where they had to walk around and interview their classmates.

Kheourng was enthusiastic and diligent, as always, but he stayed on the fringes of the group. I understood that this was because monks are not allowed to touch women (and vice versa, of course). If a woman gives an offering to a monk, for example, he will hold out his scarf and she will put it on the scarf. He was standing off to the side to avoid contact with the girls in the class. This much I knew. The girls interacted with him but at distance as respectful as the confined space would allow.

One day a student arrived late to class. Naomi is a typical teenage girl so of course she always sat by her friends. On this day, though, there was only one seat left, which happened to be next to Kheourng. I motioned for her to take the seat but she shook her head no and stayed put. The look on her face said no effing way!

Without a word Ly Hour (who was sitting with his friends) got up and took the seat next to Kheourng. Naomi took the seat Ly Hour vacated. The students understood that Naomi would not sit next to Kheourng out of respect. The students in this class were respectful to me but I was constantly struck by the deference they showed to Kheourng. When they did the interview activity they had to write down each other's names. Those who spoke to the monk wrote his name as "Mr. Kheourng".

The little boy in the front of the photo is Vathna. If you try to say that 100 times I assure you you will not pronounce it correctly. (I still can't!) He was the youngest student in the class (14) but one of the best, a whipsmart, sweet, funny kid who is always, always smiling. He's a tiny kid, but he has the deep, husky voice of a man three times his age and size.

One of the practice writing assignments I gave them was to write about a childhood friend. We had spent a lot of time talking about adjectives to describe personality. I tell my students I want to see the vocabulary we discuss used correctly. Vatha wrote "My friend is generous. After class he alway give me snakes." Snacks. We all had a little laugh over that one.

I teach more classes than most of the other teachers (for the money, of course) which means I have hundreds of essays to mark during exam week. You can only read 15-20 before your brain turns to mush and you have to walk away for a few minutes to recharge. In the staffroom you can hear teachers periodically bursting into laughter at something they've read in an essay. We're not being mean. Some of the mistakes and turns of phrase are genuinely funny. I remarked that when my students' writing can't make me laugh I'll know it's time to move on.

On the exam for this class the students had to write about their best friend. A girl named Sothea, who you can't see in this photo, wrote at the end. "I love her so much. People think we are lesbian. But I say no she just my friend."

Still, my favorite is the student who started an essay on the advantages and disadvantages of traveling abroad by writing "Traveling abroad is one of the best ways to visit another country." Can't argue with that.

Saigon kiss

Tomorrow I am taking the bus to Saigon to visit friends for a few days. Believe it or not, as of April 13 I will have been living in Cambodia for a year! I can't believe how fast it went. So in honor of my triumphant return to Saigon I thought I'd write about my first Saigon kiss.

I never got one while I was in Vietnam. I've gotten two in Phnom Penh. Motorbikes are the primary mode of transportation in both countries. Motorbike mufflers get hot. Eventually you will get careless when you get off your bike and the muffler will burn your leg.


It looks like hell but actually -- no, actually it hurts like hell too. Hydrocortisone cream helps the itching but there's no avoiding the elliptical scar that results.

Of course, girls ride motos too. I am working on a post on footwear fashions in Southeast Asia. Long story short, many girls here wear high heels all the time. My friend To, who I am writing about in another post, does not own a pair of flat shoes. There is nothing sexier than a pretty young girl wearing short shorts and high heels on a scooter. One of the many joys of life in Southeast Asia...

As a result you see shockingly pretty girls wearing the least amount of clothing allowed by law and sexy shoes to show off their long slender legs, legs which happen to have constellations of scars from muffler burns and moto accidents. And yes, as you have probably guessed, I find this sexy too.