A wedding!

“Sister, sister, get up!” I finished tying up my mosquito net and reluctantly folded my blankets to set them at the foot of my bed. The wind was shaking the house and I pulled a jacket on over my long sleeve shirt because I was shivering in the grey light of dawn. I unlatched my door and pushed the double doors open to find my younger sister Rosa sitting on the porch, make-up boxes in front of her as she carefully applied eye shadow to her almond eyes. She flashed me a quick smile and I stepped down the wooden stairs, feeling more and more chilled from the surprisingly icy wind as I brushed my teeth and splashed water onto my face in the bathroom.

We were in a bit of a hurry – in less than a half hour, all of my young female family members, and even the handsome 25-year-old cousin I call George and the younger 14-year-old cousin Kdompy who adores his every move, would be lined up with more fruit than any single family, no matter how extended, could ever eat. They told me yesterday that we would be carrying fruit for the wedding of an acquaintance, one of the many ceremonies wrapped up into the wedding event of the Khmer people. I could barely contain my excitement; the groom is an American returning briefly to the country, and it is always a thrill to meet someone who understands my accent and the culture that I was raised in. My other sister Lita zipped up my lacy purple shirt and I fastened my new tailored skirt and rushed out the door to find more relatives beginning to pile into a little white Camry, a typical taxi.

But today the taxi was full of family, 7 pretty women in lacy and satin and silk, 5 squeezed in the back, 2 in the front with the driver. Myself the only one in flip flops, all the rest in their highest heels which, while it made them considerably taller than normal, they still were nowhere near reaching my own 5’10” height.

The rumor was that this is basically the wedding of the year – a fact which I still cannot doubt. The bride is a young 20-year-old from one of the richest families in town. My own family is well off, with a pretty wooden house, traditionally modest with a tin roof but modern in the conveniences of generally reliable running water and electricity; we have healthy meals every day, fruit and vegetables and meats with our daily rice, and my host father brings home nice snacks when he comes back from the city on the weekends. No one goes hungry and there is usually something leftover to give to the stray animals that lurk around and look pleadingly up at our table as we eat. But this bride’s family, their wealth, stands out among the town that surrounds it.

Their house is a tall mix of concrete and shiny tile, with pale green paint and a porch with shiny pink banisters. A grey satellite dish sticks out from the otherwise polished exterior and their immense yard on the main road is usually filled with men waiting to work or huge trucks piled tall with red bags of rice. I’ve ridden past it at least 4 times a day, on my way to and from school to teach, usually avoiding the stares and calls from the group of men but constantly curious about the building. I imagined that it was just a stopping point for the rice, that the building had an office in it, never realizing the wealth that lay in the property and the family that owns it, in the business of rice distribution for a district and province known just for its proximity to Thailand and its production of the staple food of the country.

Today we were dropped in the middle of that lot, though today there were no dust-covered trucks, no men in grubby clothes, and little space; a huge bright wedding tent filled with flowers and chairs covered in mock-silk transformed the usually bare space into a banquet hall, a chapel, a shrine to love and family. The huge doors of the house were open to reveal the living room which was covered with wedding paraphernalia: flowers and squares of bright fabric with fancy Khmer script noting the special day, painted landscape backdrops and umbrella lights for photos, the many plates of fruit and food wrapped up with bows and saran wrap lined neatly on the floor. To one side, members of the band dressing in their shiny white jackets, to another, the crew working on perfecting the wedding decorations and setting up the sound equipment for the presentation. The other half of the lot was filled with cars, some familiar taxis, others recognizably important. Even the spirit house, a miniature palace on a stand, was decorated with bright flowery wreaths and extra offerings of food and drink for luck.

I searched the crowd and saw faces I recognized: some of my students from various grades, some important people I met in my first few weeks here – the police chief, an officer of the district branch of the government, the wife of an education official, a few relatives that have stopped infrequently at my house for a visit. More and more people showed up, men in dress shirts with shiny belt buckles, younger guys with their hair immobile from styling, girls in every color of the rainbow, women with satins and skirts completely mismatched to my eyes. There was a rush of color as we all piled into the house to grab a plate of fruit – like someone pushing around a bowl of skittles.

There was some commotion beyond that. I kept hearing 200 meters, 300 meters… wondering what they were talking about. Well, since the groom lives in America, we can’t follow the tradition a purely as possible, by carrying the gifts of fruit and beer and snacks from his home to hers. Instead, we all just walk some small distance away, pair up with a person of the same produce, and walk back to put the fruit where it all was in the first place. That is the ceremony. And that is what we did. Though, it was a bit grander than I had expected – the average wedding will have 60-100 plates of fruit, if you’re on a budget, 30 is acceptable. This particular wedding had 300 plates. 300. We were one long line of gifts.

Of course, there is a bit of expense wrapped up in 300 plates of fruit; this is only one part of the wedding ceremony, which means that the other ceremonies and the more important reception are completely separate expenses. For 300 plates, you first need, well, 300 plates of fruit, beer, snacks, noodles, and so on, and since it is winter, most of the good fruits will be out of season and more expensive than usual. You need decorations and bows for the plates, and you will most likely buy extra fruit so only the prettiest fruit goes on display and you will have considerable extra because you only can use an even number of plates for each fruit. Then, you will likely want to reward the people who wrap all of your fruit in said plates and sarans and bows with a meal or…anything really. And then, you will have to consider getting all of these people to your wedding, seating them for the ceremony (there is a program after the carrying), paying them a small fee for their kindness, and finally feeding them breakfast (all at once) before anything else begins. And, you’ll need the prettiest clothes to wear in front of them…

So we somehow all lined up, all 300 of us, having found out fruit buddy and somehow withstanding the still icy winds blowing our hair out of place. I realize that icy is a bit overstated, but it is like being caught in a tank top on the first cold day of fall, with no shade and a huge breeze from the north. And the band played, and we walked, and the photographer and the videographer, and the various spectators still in their sarongs and jackets took special notice of me, the girl with white skin who happened to be towering above the heads of every girl around her (the boys walk in the back for the most part, because they aren’t as pretty in their normal clothes as we are in our spectacularly colored, beaded, appliquéd, flowery, excessive, decorated ones).

And we went back to the big house – the groom with his groomsmen carrying his shade umbrella and some pretty matching girls carrying some flowers leading the parade on the main road, which is to say, the only road that doesn’t dead end in a village or rice paddy, And through the traffic, we delivered the groom’s offering to the bride’s family.

So we sat in rows and rows of chairs to watch the ceremony: the wedding singer dancing up the aisle with a pretty lady by his side, the Khmer equivalents of the flower girl and ring bearer in front of them, collecting bits of fruit in a basket along the way so that when they reach the end they will have something to eat together and taste as a sort of prelude to the adult festivities. The boy asks the girl what she would like to eat, and she chooses, and with both sets of hands somehow holding the fruit she bites, and he asks, “Is it sweet?” And she says, “Yes, it’s sweet.” She does the same for him, and a song is sung.

The groom does the same walk, giving some symbolic thing to the parents and assembled family members who are seated at the end of the line. The bride makes her appearance, led by an older female family member (a position which may have been offered to me for my sister’s future wedding), her bridesmaids trailing behind her. The bride and groom go up and down the aisles, led by photographers and videographers and the emcee who are all giving instructions and worrying about the placement of the frill on the umbrellas.

There was lots of chaos with all of the cameramen, which in this wedding was a bit exacerbated with the groom who is American in many definitions of the word. My family tells me that his Khmer (we never had the opportunity to speak with one another) is at the same level as mine, which is to say that deep conversations about thoughts and feelings won’t be first on the topic list, and that the bride’s English is… well. The emcee even made a joke about it while someone was trying to get him to turn his head just so; “Say it in English, maybe he’ll understand…”

I was the only one who laughed out loud. Which, then, put the attention on me – and the emcee began talking about the groom’s ‘fellow American’ who looked so lovely in the traditional Khmer shirt and skirt.

When it was all over we put the food back where we found it and went out to the tables at the side of the house. They were under tents, but given the wind still blowing cold, we moved them out into the sunshine to enjoy the rice porridge with bean sprouts and beverages. Our table had Coke and Fanta, though I saw some all-men tables with whisky and beer – I couldn’t think of a reason not to drink at 8:30 either.

And that was it…we piled back into the taxi and went home, various stolen drinks and fruits in our hands, and enjoyed the rest of the Saturday.


Side note: despite not eating the seafood in the rice porridge, I still got terribly sick from something that I ate that morning, with a bacterial infection or amoebas or something, and it was not fun. But, fear not! All better!!

Happy Day Story

Today a very bad fire broke out in a little shop near the new market. It was a shop that I have never been inside, though one that I have ridden past several times; it is close to both the phone shop that I like and the place with the best coffee in town (which I have heard from 3 classes of students and learned through a bit of personal exploration). I know very little about the fire, though the rumors are that no one was hurt, even though that wasn’t the first piece of information ever volunteered for me, that it was caused through some faulty wiring, which doesn’t surprise me, and that there was somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 of damage done to the property and the goods inside. Pretty incredible given I cannot even imagine that much money in one building. I also know that one of my students either lost her home or her family’s livelihood or both today.
I know what you’re thinking…happy day story? Well, I went to look at the remains of the building at about 5:00, I saw a few things. In true Khmer fashion…when I went, after the fire had been put out by a fire truck – a real fire truck – there was a crowd outside the building like a carnival was in town. I barely stood out in the crowd. But there were a few children that noticed me. I recognized one of the kids from a few of the weddings that I’ve been to – he is a cute and always dirty little boy with a mop of ashy brown hair and a bright white smile that stands out with his dark skin – and he hangs around parties to collect cans (and therefore, cash) and grab some leftovers after the party guests depart.
He and a little posse stood in front of my parked bike while I assessed the damage and the chaos and they stared me down until I began to make some conversation with them. I said hello and they smiled. I said hello in Khmer and they giggled a bit. I asked for one child’s name and the others told me…none of them answered with their own name, just another’s. I asked what they had and in his young voice he asked me to repeat myself. Baat? (Yes for boys).
He had acquired a string of rubber bands woven together and was wearing it as a necklace that looped twice around him and fell to his belly button on both rings. I saw him later playing jump rope with the thing – and the string went over a foot over his head at its peak in the air.
Another couple of kids came, some older than his (perhaps) 6 years, some younger. A few younger girls were trying to carry a tiny little furball of a puppy and passing him around, dropping him once in the process, but generally taking good care of his very still body that seemed about the size of their torsos. Another kid looked like he had just eaten a chocolate ice cream cone (unlikely) and the evidence was all over his chin. I asked more names, they other kids filled me in, and I heard one of them tell another to ask my name, obviously shy or nervous or both at the Khmer-speaking-barang-girl in front of them. I told them my Khmer name, Bopha (the flower of poetry), and as they giggled and repeated my answer I heard one boy say neakroo, teacher.
I didn’t immediately recognize this particular boy, but he spoke more, saying, she is a teacher, she came to the primary school. The boy was there when I went to visit the kindergarteners with their teacher, my friend. I was more than shocked that this boy could remember such a thing after so much time has passed, but also so happy that I made some impression on a single child in the town. I hope to influence more as my time passes here…it is easy as you settle into life here to forget that you may make a difference with just a few hours of your time, that sometimes the things that you forget someone will remember for days or weeks or years to come, that it may influence the life that they choose to lead.

*Bonus info: My friend the kindergarten teacher got married just a few days ago to a very sweet and tall boy from Siem Riep, and he was very thrilled to speak a little English with me. The wedding was a food and music-filled festival, as usual, with a lot of my teacher friends in various stages of sobriety or lack thereof, which led me to reflect on this strange piece of the culture that prefers daytime drunkenness to the evening party scene.

Plus…please note the photo – I feel like a giant in the thinnest flip flops I own. And to think they would prefer me in a heel.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!!!

I am happy to say that I reigned in the new year by partying hard until past midnight (quite a feat these days) with a whole crew of Volunteers from around the Banteay Meanchay province. There were Americans, Brits, Aussies, Dutch folk, some Germans, and a gal from Andorra, which is, despite some intense discussion, really a country. Promise. We had some lovely pasta, some great desserts, and a lot of music that reminded me a bit of an American wedding reception - until it switched to Khmer wedding music - and then some ABBA, so it was a good day.

So with that, I wish all the best to you this year, and I hope that 2009 is the year for all good things (like a healing of the American economy) to happen!

Merry Christmas!

Lita, Rosa, Phanit and me!

A Photo!

Things I like

12-14

Very recently I was speaking with my good friend Deidre about, as usual, the fact that we have more time on our hands than work could ever possibly fill. We can try to fill our time by building our muscles with exercise and physical activity, cramming our head full of words from books, working on our language skills (Khmer, not English – my spoken English skills continue to evaporate through lack of use), or picking up some new hobby or skill, but there is only so many hours that can be filled with that sort of business. We find that we, therefore, find the things that give us the greatest amounts of joy in order to supply us with the sanity that we need to fulfill our obligations to the great county of Cambodia. For Deidre, it is coffee with a newspaper (a great thanks to Dan’s family for sending the Economist for our perusal) and anything/everything about the mornings, including the rise of the sun, the food usually served, the routines, the fresh fried bananas…everything.
And for me? Life here is so… what can I say? Slow isn’t the right word, though time moves at a different pace here. It isn’t simple, either, though that adjective comes to mind as well. For a person new to this culture and this language, nothing is simple, though life is nowhere near as difficult as it was – the market is not as intimidating, the general spectators of my life give me less trouble than before (as a foreigner, this is everyone), and I have no dread of the fact that there will be rice at my next meal (mainly because my body has discovered a certain dependency for that particular grain). As life gets easier, I find more things that give me the joy that I need to survive so far from home and so far from the life that I lived for 20 some years.
There is almost nothing that I find better than an afternoon bike ride with some mood music blaring out the numerous statements of wonder and attention that I get on an amazingly daily basis. The countryside is lined like Iowa with rice supplying the color instead of corn, and dotted with palm trees instead of big elms or oaks, and as I ride through a village hazy with dust as the sun sets, I feel a surreal wave wash over me at the life that I live. I find joy as I sit respectfully in the temple, gazing at the statues of Buddha and the paintings of his life. In my village the temple is unfinished – the doorways have no doors, the windows no panes, and a cool breeze blows the scent of incense across my face. When I get home, I know that wherever I live there will be a hammock, and I will sit and read as I do here. I have spent many hours lost in fiction as I slowly swing in the hammock with a glass of jasmine tea. I’m not sure how I will ever survive another winter.
There are more things that I like (isn’t that what Martha Stewart says?). The Khmer people have a certain kiss that they give to babies and children – they press their face up close to the child and take a deep breath through their nose – and my yiey recently gifted me with the same kiss, which gave me a sort of strange giddiness that I can’t explain. Such closeness is a rare commodity for me here – hugs with boys are expressly prohibited and I’m not quite to a hugging level with my female family members, so the contact was well appreciated. In fact, the closest I am allowed to get to boys (not that I am complaining, mind you, at least not much) is in transit, when I am squeezed in a taxi next to a silent middle aged man, a talkative middle aged lady who is enthralled with the hair on my arms, or a teen-looking boy who steals glances at me but is much too frightened to speak to me. There are many places to find humor here.

The Great Mouse Adventure.

12-14-08

There were mice in my room. I cannot be sure how many lived there at any given time, nor can I be particularly sure where they lived within my abode at any particular moment, but I knew they were there. On a few occasions I heard the pitter patter of little feet scrambling through the boards that line my room near the roof. On considerably more occasions, I swept up a few gifts that they had left me in various nooks and corners of my room. But on the most memorable occasion, I returned from a compulsory visit to the big town of Battambang and began to put some clothes away when one brave little mouse jumped from my clothes back onto the wall and scurried away. It was this occasion (plus the holes in one of my favorite shirts) that compelled me to act.
So my family brought me a little can of yellow goo, which we in turn spread onto a plate-like circle of plastic with a juicy selection of fish heads in the middle (my grandmother’s choice, not mine – I would rather tempt them with some more clothing, perhaps a piece of the same fruit that I saw a seed of in my room). And we put our 2 ‘pizzas,’ as my family so quaintly put it, into my freshly cleaned room. Coincidentally, I found the living quarters of the little rodents: in one of my tennis shoes that has lain untouched for the joy of flip-flops. I am fairly certain that they enjoyed my shoelaces as their pillows, because they tore them to pieces and piled them with the scraps of some of my other clothing.
It should be mentioned that the day that I cleaned my room so well was also the day that I hung up my lucky find from Battambang: brightly colored flashing Christmas lights. I mention this because as I sat and gazed at them in the sheer joy of the holidays, my grandmother came in and warned me that the mice wouldn’t come out if they were on all night. She is always looking out for me, in true yiey (grandmother) fashion. She is also a surprising source of hilarity: During one lunch during the very eventful mouse adventure week, as I was lamenting about the mice biting on my clothes and shoes, etc, etc, my yiey began talking about the biting of ears. At first I didn’t understand what she was talking about… no, yiey, the mice didn’t eat my ears! … Oohhh, the mice could have eaten my ears? … Holly-ield? Eye-son? … What about fighting? … You mean Mike Tyson? Evander Holyfield? I could not control my laughter. I am continually amazed about the bits of information that the people here has access to – and the times that they choose to reveal such knowledge.
But on with the previous topic. I woke up the morning after I placed the fish ‘pizzas’ strategically on my floor, with a very restless night fraught with mice whimpering and a strange fear of what was happening under my bed, to find not one, not two, but four mice struggling for freedom in their respective sticky circles. And what followed might have been one of the most horrifying things I have ever seen. I don’t consider myself a squeamish person, but watching my host mother peel the mice off of the disc with a stick and pound their heads against a rock until they stopped moving, and then throw the pile of carcasses into the nearby pond as fish food… well, it was a little much for 6 in the morning. Over the next two days, two more mice were caught in the gummy trap and suffered the same fate – I found it a bit ironic that we used fish for bait and then fed the dead back to the fish, but I suppose the circle of life is a bit different in this hemisphere. Why wouldn’t it be when so many other things are…

Typical Day......

A Typical Day right now:

6 am – Tear myself out of bed to brave the icy (only a slight overstatement) northern winds for my cold morning shower to get ready for school by wearing my traditional Khmer skirt and a long sleeve button-up shirt.
6:45 am – Hop on my bike and ride the 2K to school on the very bumpy and usually dusty, if not obscenely muddy, road.
7 am – Meet up with my buddy and co-teacher Chhay to watch the morning assembly as we eat ramen soup or rice with meat with the other teachers at school.
7:15 am – Teach a class, usually grade 10 or 11.
8:00 am – Have a break, consisting of joking around with fellow teachers or chatting with some students.
8:15 am – More class.
9 am – Another break.
The class and the breaks continue…though sometimes I watch/play volleyball with students and other teachers.
11 am – Go back on the bike and fight the northern winds to get home.
11:30 am – Eat rice with some sort of stir fry and fruit for lunch.
12 pm – Relax, read a book, nap, do laundry, clean, or play around on my computer.
2 pm – Return to school after another shower for sports or lower grade level classes.
4 pm – Go on a bike ride around the district (the farthest being about 5K away) and exercise with volleyball playing or some yoga.
6 pm – Wash up and eat a dinner of eggs or fried ramen or stir fry little pieces of fried meat with spicy sauce, chat with the family.
7:30 pm – Relax by watching TV, writing, talking with the family, helping with English, or doing some combination of the above.
10 pm (or earlier) – Fall into a peaceful slumber sometimes disturbed by obnoxious dogs, party music, or the rooster that I would prefer cooked on a plate in front of me.

Banteay Chhmar

11-22-08

In celebration of the Bon Om Tuk (Water Festival), in which bunches of people watch boat races in Phnom Penh (and the ever-popular water parade with Vegas-style lights on a bunch of boats at nighttime), my friends from the province came to visit my site and we all went up to Banteay Chhmar temple to watch a smaller scale of boat races and tour the local ruins.
The boat races were a little bit like watching a game of baseball for me, with the exception of having a cool stadium to peruse, lots of awfully unhealthy food and drink to consume, and really entertaining fans to make me laugh. In fact, there is little to no cheering and I was eating grapefruit for my snack while we sat on a river bank and saw just a few seconds of action in any given 20 minutes. It was a little disappointing…but I think that most of you know that I can have fun just about anywhere, so of course I enjoyed myself.
And then there was the temple…wow. There is a huge complex with towers and walls and lakes and tunnels and the adventures are endless for climbing and discovering beautiful scenery. “Climbing: is certainly the optimal word there, though, because the whole complex is in ruins, with these immense stone bricks stacked up in some haphazard way…I continuously wondered how they had gotten into such a state considering how sturdy and secure they were under my feet. We can climb to the top of the tower spires and go into the “Narrow Fortress” (aka Banteay Chhmar) underneath the tall walls. We explore the walls littered with old Sanskrit engravings and try not to trip in the blinding darkness broken only with tiny creaks that we can somehow squeeze out of back into the tree shadowed sunshine. It would be easy to get lost in the temple, with the many towers beginning to look like one another and all of the rubble confusing your sense of direction. The corridors under the high walls begin to look all the same and the little ponds and grassy knolls within the complex somehow have all of the same people around.
But it is so gorgeous and so fun… On one of the walls there is Apsara with more arms than I could count, and a giant Buddha statue nearby, and so many Poloroids-to-be that I could barely keep my batteries from running out.

And then the rest of the holiday… After a leisurely meal with my friends, we went with my family to the nearest wat in the town. Normally the quietest place in town, that night the party was there, and it looked like a carnival and a rave and church at Christmas all in the same little complex. Rowdy kids had firecrackers just like the Fourth of July, the monks were leading a lengthy prayer to the ancestors, and the rest of the young folk were dancing in the big circle of fencing while everyone was milling about and eating more sweets than I am sure that they need. My sisters bought little boats made from flowers and foam and ribbon and lit the candles to send them off in the nearby pond. I think that that could have been a really pretty sight if there were a whole sea of little flowers and candles, but the wind was wrong I think. It was fun anyway, and then we went home.

The Wedding

11.21.08
As in all events, this one can never begin at the beginning of the day. Granted, I will not start with the engagement, because I still am unsure about the relationship of the bride and groom to my family or really to one another, nor will I begin with any sort of wedding event, because the most exciting start came with my brand new shirt.
The fact that my current host mom is a tailor has come in handy numerous times already. She fixed my sarong that was torn from too much vigorous activity with the boys, she tailored my pants that the weight loss had made unwearably huge, and she let me dig through her scraps and play with her sewing machine, which I sure many of you could guess, gave me endless enjoyment. The fact that she made me a beautiful shirt in the span of a day while also making some of the wedding clothes is nothing short of miraculous, though. And the shop is altogether entertaining as well. It goes something like this… I’m going to make you a shirt, so I have to measure you all over – raise your arms, lower your arms, hold this a minute, wow you’re big!, ok all done. Here’s your shirt! Try it on now (as we stand in the very public shop outside our home). Here’s the curtain to stand behind – no bras allowed. By the way, while you are being sheltered from the local men with the little curtain, the local women who are in any way connected to the shop are more than welcome to help judge the beauty of the workmanship. This of course happened, and I still don’t know the girl who watched me get down to almost nothing as I changed into my new shirt. I also didn’t expect to be felt up by both my host mother and my host grandmother as they discussed the cut of the shirt and how it felt. In the tailor’s shop…all rules are off (not that there are as many girl to girl rules as there are girl to boy rules…).
This second ‘shirt experience’ was pretty entertaining for me, mainly because my Khmer skills have dwindled with my easy access to English and my complete lack of ability to use the English with my mom and my grandma. Neither of them speak a word, but I’ve learned most of my pronunciation and grammar from them, so fair trade. It is also entertaining (and I’ll get to this more later) because of the length of time that we wear said fancy clothes.

Now the fun part…the pre wedding preparations. I am pretty certain that we are related to the bride, some aunt cousin twice removed or something…Khmer calls everyone uncle or aunt or big brother, so it is sometimes hard to say. But, we went over to the groom’s place to put a huge (huge) amount of fruit and vegetables and slabs of meat and noodles onto plates with saran wrap and pretty bows in preparation for the first part of the ceremony. The next morning, in our prettiest clothes and as my aunt caked a bunch of make-up on my face, we went back over to the same place, took a plate, and the procession of pretty girls in sparkling outfits of any color imaginable brought all of the groceries over to the bride’s nearby house with a light sprinkle of rain falling from above. We took a seat and listened to the wedding singer and local emcee sing a while, the groom and bride gave a selection of fruit to the parents, and then the equivalent of the flower girl and ring bearer performed a little skit with unwrapping some fruit and feeding it to one another. “It’s sweet,” and “It’s sour,” sort of like a Something Borrowed, Something Blue sort of tradition.
But then we got to change (after about an hour), back into cute normal clothes for the Hair cutting ceremony, where couples take turns fake cutting the bride and groom’s hair for good luck. I tried to ask if getting a hair cut is lucky on all occasions, but unfortunately, it is not. All of this takes place in the bride’s home, because the culture is matrilocal and generally the husbands move into their wives’ homes after the wedding.
And then a break, though we did return that evening for the “Bride Price Negotiation Ceremony,” which considerably more singing and music than discussion, once again in street clothes, though the bridal party had an outfit for each one of these separate ceremonies and even more than I saw. This ceremony was only notable for me because I got to play with some of the local instruments, and I met the jack of all trades of musicians, the man from the village who could play each of the instruments without hardly paying any attention.
The next morning there was more make-up, and more music, and more pretty clothes, and more people than I have ever seen in one place in this village. I had flowers in my prettily braided hair and my fancy new shirt on, and it appears that I was the belle of the ball (at 10 in the morning that is…). There was no ceremony to see, just the bride and groom and wedding party in yet another outfit, this one was red I think, and a lot of food and boose (at 10 in the morning that is…).
So I was seated at a table with a fellow teacher and a bunch of people who I didn’t know, including one woman that barely fit into her fancy shirt and who had this very distinct mole above her constant frown. The table with full with drinks of all kinds, the strange fruity things that the people here like as well as beer and whisky with soda. And then the meal began…appetizers with sugary peanuts and spring rolls with peanut sauce, some jerky-like pork, an entire fish that stared up at me while I explained over the blaringly loud music how little I ate fish back in the States, some stir-fry, and the grand finale: a portable electric stove with a volcano style pot complete with raw veggies and pork and a chunk of lard to cook it with…right in front of your eyes. It was absolutely delicious, and available for only $5, generously paid by my host family. Amid all of this, the waiters, or young guys most likely related to the family, the drink servers, young guys most likely related to the family, and the ice carriers, young ladies like my sister who are somehow related to the family, and the can carriers, young kids with string who go around and pick up all of the empties from the ground, are moving about in the grace of the Khmer people.
And while all of the women are trying to chat at the table and generally behaving and running the scene, the men are… (I just taught this word and about 5 adjectives to my co-teacher) getting sloshed. Lightweight is too generous a word to describe how quickly the alcohol affects them – I’ve decided that with the heat of the day, the organic food, and the fact that the majority weigh half as much as me, it’s to be expected, though I do find it unusual when 15 full grown men are dancing together on the dance floor, completely un-sober, at half past noon on a sunny Sunday afternoon. It’s even less likely to see them, plus a few others, push each other over for a chance to dance near me (which is only a slight, very slight, exaggeration of what actually happened). There was the one who sat just a little too close to me and begged for a dance throughout most of the afternoon, the one who offered me a drink every time I finished a dance circle, the one who, whenever he saw me, gave me a ‘heya pal’ tap on my cheek (highly inappropriate for this culture…), the one who barged in on my dancing with a girlfriend and practically fell over trying (Need I say that none of these men were in the ‘attractive’ age group?). But I had fun anyway, despite the adventure…I danced with my girlfriend, my sisters, my adorable cousin George, other members of the host family, and talked with a future English teacher at the school. It was all over, no more than a few hours of dining and dancing and drinking, even less for those who didn’t stay for the dancing part!
And after I had listened to the same song about 7 times at the 3 hour wedding celebration, I went home and heard it played from afar at least another 6 times. The song: I’m in love with a foreign girl.