This is a final post just to let any of you who are following this blog know that I am home, safe and sound...and even somewhat rested. I flew home via Seoul, though there was such thick fog there that my plane was diverted to Busan, a city further south in Korea. We spent several hours on the tarmac there before flying into Seoul, with just barely enough time to make my connection to the NY flight. (One of my bags didn't make the quick transfer, but I'm assured it will be delivered to my door tomorrow.)
This is the first time I've flown back from Asia by leaving there at midnight, rather than at midday. That meant that it was daylight when we flew across Japan, and then (after a night shortened by the direction we were traveling) it was daytime again as we flew across much of northeastern Canada. I had a window seat and was able to see a Japanese volcano with partly collapsed cone, and later, vast stretches of Canada's northcountry, with ice covering all the rivers and inlets. It's astonishing how far north evidence of human habitation is visible from the air.
I had treated myself to a massage the day I left Phnom Penh, and perhaps that explains why I am less knotted up physically than I've felt in the past after these long transits. It takes more than 18 hours IN THE AIR to do this trip, so of course from arriving at the departure airport to clearing customs at the final airport takes something like 30 hours. I find it hard to keep track of time, especially given the international date line between Asia and North America. Though I spent all that time in transit, I left Phnom Penh just before midnight on Tuesday February 3 and I arrived in NY just before noon on Wednesday February 4. It's very Alice in Wonderland.
I write this morning after a chance to sleep in my own bed for something like normal hours. And I feel quite content with my adventure. Certainly I have given myself the great gift of a break from routine. My decision to return to SE Asia and build some on my knowledge of language and culture there, rather than exploring a totally new piece of the global landscape, feels right. My instinct to do some volunteer work but NOT teach also seems sound. For the first two weeks, while I was on the Earthwatch dig, the biggest decision I faced each day was whether to have fried rice or toast and yogurt for breakfast. Otherwise, everything was taken care of for me, and I didn't bear any responsibility for helping the personalities on the team integrate or see that everyone was content enough or monitor progress toward the overall scholarly goals of the dig. It was a great treat not to be in charge, and this opened up room for me to just be with myself and offer appreciation to those who were carrying those responsibilities.
Living on CLA street in Phnom Penh allowed me to feel the rhythm of an urban neighborhood in a developing country in a way that living in a guest house never would have. The aural landscape was continuous from 6am until 10:30pm...live music (some traditional instruments being played at the orphanage just feet away from my balcony and a girl learning violin at an apartment two doors from mine), lots of recorded Cambodian pop music and plenty of radio, including Western classics (House of the Rising Sun and the theme from TITANIC are both popular), sounds of babies and children playing, sounds and smells of cooking from the 8 households within 20 feet of my 3 rooms in one direction or another, dishwashing, laundry and so forth. I watched a neighbor repot all his outdoor plants for Chinese New Year, breaking them out of their pots to do so. I watched the way the street keeps an eye on its children. I got the elderly lady with some form of dementia who spent hours sitting listlessly outside her daughter's house on the block to smile at me on her good days, because I made a point of making eye contact and nodding or smiling to her every time I passed. I used every trip up and down the uneven concrete stairs to my apartment as an opportunity to stop and be mindful--one of the benefits of my fall down a flight of stairs two years ago, when I was lucky to break only an ankle.
I made inroads in understanding family culture a bit and in being able to speak. One of the small highs of my final day in Cambodia was the tuk-tuk driver who thanked me when I paid him by calling me "borng s'ray" or big sister...which I chose to understand as testimony to the fact that though I was clearly a westerner I had spoken to him all in Khmer and been able to give directions and had known what the fair price for the distance he was taking me was. In response he used the same nomenclature for me he would for a Khmer woman my age in relation to his. A small victory of cultural literacy, which is something I care about.
My thanks to all of you who have supported me in this venture, whether by making it possible for me to have a leave from teaching, or by covering what I would ordinarily be doing, or by your encouragement, or by following this blog. I have a few more weeks of relatively open time before I go back to a full schedule of teaching and directing, around March 1. I am awake to how lucky I am.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
Cooking Class
It's another gorgeous 80 degree day here in Phnom Penh. On the next to last day of my adventure, I decided to take a Cambodian cooking class, sponsored by a restaurant here. As promised, it began at 9am with a trip to the market. I finally learned what the mystery ingredient galangal actually looks like. It's similar to ginger but a larger and more yellow root, and the two can't be substituted for one another. It's listed in a number of the recipes I have in cookbooks at home, and since I haven't known what to look for in Asian markets, I've been stumped.
After the market trip, I climbed two sets of very steep metal stairs to a rooftop cooking school with two companions (a young Australian couple just finished with a 2-week volunteer tour of Thailand, and about to connect with their Cambodian tour group) and our teacher. The breeze was lovely, and there were 10 stations with gas cook tops and cutting boards and large wooden mortar and pestles waiting for us there. Plus a skillful and shy young woman who did all the washing up and had our ingredients prepped for us as we worked through the day.
The teacher is a young chef, just 22, with good English. He is a graduate of Friends, the NGO program that runs two restaurants (and a souvenir shop and now also a tailor shop) in Phnom Penh that are entirely staffed by former street kids. They learn to be servers and kitchen staff, and eventually graduate to jobs in other restaurants around the city. This young man came from the provinces near Viet Nam and spent two years on the streets in PP before he started at Friends, where he trained for 6 years. He's now designed the menu for the restaurant that runs the cooking school (owned by a Dutch national) and is in university nights after teaching cooking classes for tourists 6 days a week.
By 10:30 am we had started to cook. We finished up at about 3pm, stuffed--having made spring rolls with taro and carrot, sweet and sour dipping sauce, banana blossom salad, fish amok (in a banana leaf bowl, which we also learned how to make) and sticky rice with mango and palm sugar caramel sauce for dessert.
The biggest surprise might have been seeing turmeric root. It's very skinny and you peel off a thin brown skin to reveal a deep orange color. Wherever you touch it it stains your fingers bright yellow. We mashed it up in the mortar and pestle with shallots, garlic, kaffir lime peel (very bumpy!), galangal, salt, minced lemongrass stalk, red chili paste, and julienned nhor leaves to make the basic herb paste which is then thinned with coconut milk, egg, and fish sauce. We added some crushed peanuts and slices of raw white fish and put this whole mixture into our banana leaf bowls. These then steam for 20 minutes. The fish cooks as the milky sauce turns into a kind of custard, which you garnish with julienned red sweet pepper and kaffir lime leaves, and eat with (of course) white rice.
Partly because there were just three of us in class today, but partly because it is the Khmer way, the pace of the day was leisurely and fun with plenty of time to sit and chat while we ate or while things were cooking. Altogether satisfying! If we ever run out of things to do when we're in Phnom Penh with students in the summer--an unlikely prospect--this would be a different way to spend time. They'll work up half day courses for groups, which make just two dishes, on request.
Price of this whole experience, including ingredients and instruction and more food than I could eat and a cook book with 12 recipes and step-by-step directions: $20. Quite a bargain!
After the market trip, I climbed two sets of very steep metal stairs to a rooftop cooking school with two companions (a young Australian couple just finished with a 2-week volunteer tour of Thailand, and about to connect with their Cambodian tour group) and our teacher. The breeze was lovely, and there were 10 stations with gas cook tops and cutting boards and large wooden mortar and pestles waiting for us there. Plus a skillful and shy young woman who did all the washing up and had our ingredients prepped for us as we worked through the day.
The teacher is a young chef, just 22, with good English. He is a graduate of Friends, the NGO program that runs two restaurants (and a souvenir shop and now also a tailor shop) in Phnom Penh that are entirely staffed by former street kids. They learn to be servers and kitchen staff, and eventually graduate to jobs in other restaurants around the city. This young man came from the provinces near Viet Nam and spent two years on the streets in PP before he started at Friends, where he trained for 6 years. He's now designed the menu for the restaurant that runs the cooking school (owned by a Dutch national) and is in university nights after teaching cooking classes for tourists 6 days a week.
By 10:30 am we had started to cook. We finished up at about 3pm, stuffed--having made spring rolls with taro and carrot, sweet and sour dipping sauce, banana blossom salad, fish amok (in a banana leaf bowl, which we also learned how to make) and sticky rice with mango and palm sugar caramel sauce for dessert.
The biggest surprise might have been seeing turmeric root. It's very skinny and you peel off a thin brown skin to reveal a deep orange color. Wherever you touch it it stains your fingers bright yellow. We mashed it up in the mortar and pestle with shallots, garlic, kaffir lime peel (very bumpy!), galangal, salt, minced lemongrass stalk, red chili paste, and julienned nhor leaves to make the basic herb paste which is then thinned with coconut milk, egg, and fish sauce. We added some crushed peanuts and slices of raw white fish and put this whole mixture into our banana leaf bowls. These then steam for 20 minutes. The fish cooks as the milky sauce turns into a kind of custard, which you garnish with julienned red sweet pepper and kaffir lime leaves, and eat with (of course) white rice.
Partly because there were just three of us in class today, but partly because it is the Khmer way, the pace of the day was leisurely and fun with plenty of time to sit and chat while we ate or while things were cooking. Altogether satisfying! If we ever run out of things to do when we're in Phnom Penh with students in the summer--an unlikely prospect--this would be a different way to spend time. They'll work up half day courses for groups, which make just two dishes, on request.
Price of this whole experience, including ingredients and instruction and more food than I could eat and a cook book with 12 recipes and step-by-step directions: $20. Quite a bargain!
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Khmer Lessons
One of my hopes has been that I could study the language while I'm here--in a formal way beyond the inevitable practice that comes telling tuk-tuk drivers where I want to go, and so on.
Charley introduced me to the teacher he studied with in Wisconsin, who is a native of Phnom Penh. She's been tutoring me privately at my apartment. Altogether we will have 5 two hour lessons together. My final lesson is tomorrow, in the afternoon before I fly back to the States.
Sokhary is 5-10 years younger than I am and a bundle of energy. Fortunately, she's also very patient and very positive. Sokhary was studying French in high school when the Khmer Rouge took over. She hid her knowledge (necessary to survive, since anyone who spoke foreign languages, or wore glasses, or seemed educated, was executed) and survived by virtue of luck and a tough constitution. She was sick enough to be excused from work and put in a hospital at one point, where she was given an IV drip of coconut water....and she's still here. After the war, she couldn't resume study of French for political reasons, so she took up Russian, and spent a year studying in Moscow. She teaches in the States every summer, and has for about 10 years. One of her daughters is an English teacher in PP who trains ex-pats who are here helping with mine clearance how to speak to Khmer villagers.
Sokhary started by telling me that if I learned about 80 verbs and 1000 words and a few structures, I should be able to communicate pretty well. That seemed doable. I have strategies for acquiring vocabulary--many of which I invented when I was 17 and had to learn German by immersion as an exchange student in a small village of 5,000 people where I lived for a year--but stringing words together into sensible sentences requires gears to whir in my brain at a speed they don't seem to like.
I can see that I am making progress, certainly. And people here (in the markets, the tuk tuk drivers, the servers in restaurants) are consistent and sometimes florid in their praise. This says more about the generosity of the Cambodian people than it does about my proficiency. In one foray to the Russian market where I was helping another volunteer bargain for stuff, a vendor actually GAVE us things for free because I was speaking Khmer (haltingly). But the truth is, the second two native speakers start talking to each other, I'm lost. If I'm lucky, I recognize a word here or there.
I've had the kind of time I don't have at home, or when I'm here as a chaperone, to study how Khmer is written, too. Learning to read (much less write) would take me a whole lot more time, but I can at least recognize the most common consonants and occasionally I get a common word right. There are 33 consonants, each of which can be written in three ways--ornate script for signs on buildings, slanted script for books and newspapers, and subscript. There are also, depending on how you count, more than 20 vowels, which are written above, below, in front of, or behind the consonant (or consonant cluster, if there are two consonants together, one in subscript). Most of these vowels can be pronounced two different ways, depending on whether the consonant they modify is 'first series' or 'second series.' So the sheer number of marks that one needs to be able to distinguish among is well over 100, and many are quite similar. And then there's all the variation in handwritten Khmer.....
I am trying to use the energy that I ordinarily employ on sudoku and other such finite puzzles to work on the language. Decoding the visuals is, arguably, a finite puzzle--just of a magnitude that beggars even the most fiendish multiple overlapped sudoku.
But I'm not a language whiz, so I'm going easy on myself for how much Khmer I can take in at this point in my life. I think it helps that I learned a language by immersion once in the past, but of course my brain is well past the age when language acquisition comes easy. I bow to those who have the real gift. There's a volunteer I've met here in the past, college age (Trent, for those of you who know him), who is such a person: he now speaks, reads, and writes Khmer quite fluently. He can do simultaneous verbal translation. He also is fairly well along in his study of Sanskrit and Pali--the ancestors of written Khmer. And, last he was here, he began studying Chinese. It's a grand thing there are such people in the world.
Me, all I hope to do is move closer to functional Khmer for everyday purposes, and give people a good excuse to laugh at me. That's probably the best I can do toward bridging the linguistic divide and healing the human wounds brought about by so much suffering in this land, some of which, of course, relate directly to US policies in the past. So be it!
Charley introduced me to the teacher he studied with in Wisconsin, who is a native of Phnom Penh. She's been tutoring me privately at my apartment. Altogether we will have 5 two hour lessons together. My final lesson is tomorrow, in the afternoon before I fly back to the States.
Sokhary is 5-10 years younger than I am and a bundle of energy. Fortunately, she's also very patient and very positive. Sokhary was studying French in high school when the Khmer Rouge took over. She hid her knowledge (necessary to survive, since anyone who spoke foreign languages, or wore glasses, or seemed educated, was executed) and survived by virtue of luck and a tough constitution. She was sick enough to be excused from work and put in a hospital at one point, where she was given an IV drip of coconut water....and she's still here. After the war, she couldn't resume study of French for political reasons, so she took up Russian, and spent a year studying in Moscow. She teaches in the States every summer, and has for about 10 years. One of her daughters is an English teacher in PP who trains ex-pats who are here helping with mine clearance how to speak to Khmer villagers.
Sokhary started by telling me that if I learned about 80 verbs and 1000 words and a few structures, I should be able to communicate pretty well. That seemed doable. I have strategies for acquiring vocabulary--many of which I invented when I was 17 and had to learn German by immersion as an exchange student in a small village of 5,000 people where I lived for a year--but stringing words together into sensible sentences requires gears to whir in my brain at a speed they don't seem to like.
I can see that I am making progress, certainly. And people here (in the markets, the tuk tuk drivers, the servers in restaurants) are consistent and sometimes florid in their praise. This says more about the generosity of the Cambodian people than it does about my proficiency. In one foray to the Russian market where I was helping another volunteer bargain for stuff, a vendor actually GAVE us things for free because I was speaking Khmer (haltingly). But the truth is, the second two native speakers start talking to each other, I'm lost. If I'm lucky, I recognize a word here or there.
I've had the kind of time I don't have at home, or when I'm here as a chaperone, to study how Khmer is written, too. Learning to read (much less write) would take me a whole lot more time, but I can at least recognize the most common consonants and occasionally I get a common word right. There are 33 consonants, each of which can be written in three ways--ornate script for signs on buildings, slanted script for books and newspapers, and subscript. There are also, depending on how you count, more than 20 vowels, which are written above, below, in front of, or behind the consonant (or consonant cluster, if there are two consonants together, one in subscript). Most of these vowels can be pronounced two different ways, depending on whether the consonant they modify is 'first series' or 'second series.' So the sheer number of marks that one needs to be able to distinguish among is well over 100, and many are quite similar. And then there's all the variation in handwritten Khmer.....
I am trying to use the energy that I ordinarily employ on sudoku and other such finite puzzles to work on the language. Decoding the visuals is, arguably, a finite puzzle--just of a magnitude that beggars even the most fiendish multiple overlapped sudoku.
But I'm not a language whiz, so I'm going easy on myself for how much Khmer I can take in at this point in my life. I think it helps that I learned a language by immersion once in the past, but of course my brain is well past the age when language acquisition comes easy. I bow to those who have the real gift. There's a volunteer I've met here in the past, college age (Trent, for those of you who know him), who is such a person: he now speaks, reads, and writes Khmer quite fluently. He can do simultaneous verbal translation. He also is fairly well along in his study of Sanskrit and Pali--the ancestors of written Khmer. And, last he was here, he began studying Chinese. It's a grand thing there are such people in the world.
Me, all I hope to do is move closer to functional Khmer for everyday purposes, and give people a good excuse to laugh at me. That's probably the best I can do toward bridging the linguistic divide and healing the human wounds brought about by so much suffering in this land, some of which, of course, relate directly to US policies in the past. So be it!
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