The Art of Doing Nothing

Hello again. I found myself doing real work for nearly two hours in row and decided that some procrastablogging was in order. I’m trying to prepare for the Foreign Service Oral Exam, so I’m basically trying to have some answers ready for the questions I know that they will ask. This mainly consists of telling the state department why I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread and why they’d have to be complete idiots for not hiring me. This should be easy, given my obvious attributes, but I find myself wondering, “Does the state department consider, say, the ability to quickly open a coconut with a machete, a particularly desirable skill?” What about the art of sitting around in a hammock? You must understand that this is not a joke. Anyone who comes here for any period of time will find themselves doing a lot of sitting around. Anytime you will be required to wait more than two seconds you be invited to angkui-leng, which means to sit down, just hang out and relax. When you go to visit people, this will be the principal activity involved. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent just sitting. Sometimes no one feels the need to make conversation. You can just show up at someone’s house, sit in their hammock for a couple of hours, and then go on about your business. It’s really quite fantastic. Sometimes you have fantastic conversations, and sometimes everyone just sits there awkwardly not saying anything. There isn’t really a word for “awkward” in Khmer, and I think this is because in order to have a concept of awkward, you would first have to have some not awkward experiences with which to compare. And I don’t think there are any not awkward experiences here. But the best way to avoid awkwardness is rice. People will always invite you eat rice. Always. “Have you eaten rice yet?” is the preferred way to start a conversation. If you haven’t eaten rice, that will shortly be remedied. Even if you show up at someone’s house as they’re finishing a meal and all the food is gone, they will still ask you to eat rice, and probably offer to cook more food for you. If you have already eaten rice they will ask you to eat more rice. If you show up unannounced at someone’s house at a non-meal hour, say 3pm, or even 3am, they will apologize for not having rice, and offer to make some for you. Any awkward situation can be remedied by giving people something to eat. Luckily it is mango season, and mangoes can substitute for rice at non meal times. In a given day I can eat anywhere from 3-12 mangoes. There are usually some at home, and you absolutely cannot go anywhere without being offered mangoes at this time of year. The problem is that Cambodians tend to like strong sour and bitter flavors, and thus eat a lot of green mangoes. This makes me kind of sad as ripe, yellow/orange, sweet mangoes are delicious and if you would just wait a while those gross sour things would become soft and delicious. And you can’t eat sour fruit without spicy salt. They mix salt and chili peppers to eat green mangoes. The best thing is that my host family likes to use Tony Chachere’s Cajun Seasoning instead of taking the time to mix the salt and chili peppers. I think this is hilarious.
Getting back to the point though. What does the State Department want from me? I have many mad skills, it’s true. Why just yesterday, after being fed a meal of rice and fried pork, at hiked up a mountain at noon, when it was probably in the high 90s/low 100s. Can you do that? Doubt it. Is it an advisable thing to do? Not really. I can understand ridiculously garbled Englsih. Ex “Yesterday me go party ghost grandmother for Sophea after face house for place sell cheese.” This means “Yesterday, I went to Sophea’s grandmother’s funeral. It was in front of the place that sells fish paste. “You go eat wedding?” means “Will you attend the wedding dinner?” “Where you from?” usually means “Where have you been?” I can avoid herds of water buffalo while biking, I can do local dances, I can use chopsticks for several different purposes, I can entertain myself for hours watching motos drive by my house. Clearly I am a highly adept individual. But will the government recognize this? We shall see.
In other news I was at the beach and didn’t actually get sunburned! Yay! Oddly enough I met up with one of my students there, this is odd because the beach is really far away from our village, but it’s a small world. So now all of my students will know that when I go to the beach I swim in my underwear (Cambodians don’t get the difference between underwear and swimwear, they swim fully clothed). But usually Cambodians buy new outfits for traveling and wear their nice, new clothes to go swimming. I’m just not up for that. The beach was a good time, but Katie (the volunteer who I was traveling with) had to get back to her village for a wedding. So I tagged along. Like all Khmer weddings there was plenty of alcohol, drama, and dancing. But this one had something special: FRENCH FRIES!! The fries were part of a dish called lok lak, which is sauted, peppered beef on a bed of lettuce, onions, and tomatoes. Sometimes they fry potatoes to go along with it. Sadly this dish was made special for the Muslims, as they can’t eat the pork dishes, so we didn’t get any. But we were not going to be left out, so we just changed tables and sat with the Muslims. We tried to make it look like we were just moving to be friendly, but I think they caught on when the fries disappeared and we started scavenging them from other tables. In our defense, no one else seemed to be eating them anyway. Katie has mad scavenging skills, and secured 3 two-liter bottles of sprite for me in various stages of fullness so I could have something to drink. The best part was toward to the end of the night when they brought a gigantic plate of fries to our table. The next day I came back to my village, where there was also a party. So my students taught me how to dance to Korean pop songs. Yet another unique skill that just doesn’t seem to fit on a resume.

So just trying to get through the next few days, which will be a total whirlwind. I really should get back to work. Thanks for listening to my rants! Happy Khmer New Year to everyone!