A few more tidbits from my city by the fluvial reservoir basin:
...though I must admit that there's really nothing too exciting to report. I haven't hugged a single ursine, I haven’t been party to a high altitude donkey massacre or resulting forced relocation scandal, and I haven’t even come close to bathing naked with the locals (though god knows I’m trying). The settled life just doesn't yield the kind of weird adventures that the peripatetic one did, but then I suppose that’s to be expected.
That’s not to say it hasn’t been interesting, though. Aside from the daily round of Russian roulette on my trusty maroon city cruiser stead (still officially unnamed, but I'm leaning towards Niak Krong: Dragon of the City), there are also the ongoing joys of language lessons with our 
devoted instructor Sopip (<---) , a real gem of a teacher and my favorite (only) local friend so far. And I like her so much partially because I just relish the absurdity of the Khmer language, with with she will always be associated. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that Khmer has the longest alphabet in the world (I think, it sure feels like it anyway)—56 letters, 23 of which are vowels. 23 VOWELS. Now I know we have our own challenges in the English language, what with that whole schizophrenic "y" situation muddling up our vowel harmony, but I’m fairly confident that this is harder. Twenty-three vowels! the vast majority of which I’ve only heard produced by cats in heat or maybe sea lions. So you can imagine the scene that unfolds as we try to master these nonsense sounds, the five of us in there with Sopip yowling and aaarping like a bunch of tortured circus animals straining against our own anatomy to make our jaws contort in unnatural and unsightly ways. We have no dignity left to speak of, but we persevere.
In other news, I found an apartment and signed a lease this week, so I’m now an official resident of this madhouse of a city, a real Pnompenoise if you will. Our apartment is great, a little haven of cross breezes and natural light set back away from the street in a quiet alley next to a coconut tree. I’ll be living with another volunteer, Kim, who most recently hails from Idaho but grew up in Indonesia and Thailand, went to high school in DC, worked at the SAME grassroots campaigns office I did in LA for the Kerry campaign, and is a firm believer in the power of pet psychics. How could we not get along! We’re planning to get a kitten and I want to name it Sopip after my language teacher but I still have to feel her out on that one. I mean it as a compliment but I’m not sure if that sentiment translates well.
And then there's the rest of the crew, shown above, who are all characters in their own right but good people for sure.
So that’s really the scoop. I’m planning a trip to Vietnam next week with Tex Mex Charlsea and then I start work September first. In the meantime I’m drinking lots of cat-orange-water and occasionally indulging in a passion fruit smoothie when the mood strikes. I’m sweaty literally all the time, but life is good.
I want to hear about labor day plans and whatever else is going on back there in the land of the reasonable vowel sounds.
love, maaaowwwlly
No comments:
Post a Comment