Thursday, March 24, 2011

weddings part deux

The Wednesday and Thursday following my coteachers' wedding was another teacher's wedding. Saret, the bride-to-be, asked me to be a bridesmaid. I didn't really know what all that entailed, but she said just show up and everything would be taken care of.
Being a bridesmaid in Cambodia is not the same as being a bridesmaid in America, shocking I know. For example, you DO NOT ask your good friends to be bridesmaids in Cambodia, because you like your friends. Instead you choose people you may vaguely know who will make the pictures more beautiful. You might, say, choose two students who are very thin and pale and one foreigner who will add a certain cache to the wedding photos. Also, the wedding party does not help with anything except looking nice, but not as nice as the bride.
I did as requested and showed up, which I was told later meant being at the bride's house at 4 am. Yes, you read that right, four o'clock IN THE MORNING. The next two hours were consumed with applying enough makeup to paint a house on the bride and three bridesmaids, and teasing everyone's hair like there was some sort of eighties look-a-like contest to be participated in. Just in case your own teased hair wasn't big enough, there was plenty of fake hair to tease and pile on as well.
My personal favorite part was the eyebrow shaving. I'd like to remind everyone that is was FOUR A.M. and I can barely make it anywhere on time by seven, so I was not fully conscious when they began to shave off part of my eyebrows. When I realized what was happening I did have enough where-with-all to say, "Hey! Please don't do that. Just a little," to which the response was obviously, "No problem! Don't worry! It looks good." In case you were wondering, it doesn't look good. They are still growing back and that doesn't look good either.
The first step of the two day celebration was to go visit a few places in Siem Reap town and take pictures. This was so funny. If the experience alone wasn't enough there were all the tourists who asked to take pictures with us. I was loving it. The best part was the Japanese tourists who wouldn't notice as first that I was not Cambodian and then would make small noises of surprise maybe two minutes into their photo fest when they realized I was "French". Or the American tourists who wandered up and asked if anyone spoke English. They were really impressed with my language skills when I explained what was going on.
After the morning of picture taking, and outfit changing (I was on my second outfit, the bride was on her fourth or fifth) we returned to the house to eat rice. Then it was time for outfit number three (pink top, red pants, least comfortable) and the hair cutting ceremony. Everyone in attendance has a change to come up and pretend to cut the bride and groom's hair. I'm pretty sure money is collected too. A lot of perfume was sprayed. It was really interesting, but man did that outfit HURT! The shirt was squeezing my shoulders so badly I wanted to cry by the time it was over.
Unfortunately we only had a short dinner break before the "eating of cut fruit". I was excited by this, because who doesn't like fruit? Except that we didn't actually get to eat fruit. I did have a nice moment when I was walking in circles around the pile of fruit and firecrackers on the stage in basically a big wedding dress when I just thought, "...WHAT?!?!"
That was a pretty entertaining ceremony, though it was more just fun and less ceremony. Especially when I was handed the microphone to say hello into. Look, it speaks English!!! I especially enjoyed the lighting of the sparklers and watching the bride and groom try to take a bite out of the same apple while maintaining a Cambodian appropriate amount of space between them.
That was the end of day one and I was more than ready for a shower and some sleep, before my 3 a.m. wake-up call the next day.


to be continued...

Monday, March 21, 2011

weddings part one

A few weekends ago my coteacher was married. He invited me to the wedding. Cambodian weddings are very different than the typical "American wedding" you may think of. There are multiple days, several ceremonies, and one big party. Most guests only attend the party at the end of the wedding, which is what I did. Some students came over to my house beforehand as they wanted to travel to the wedding together, which was about 3 kilometers away. Also, it turned out, none of them knew how to apply makeup but they all wanted to wear it. So they asked me to help with their makeup. It was like high school homecoming dance all over again.


One of the other teachers offered us a ride in his car so we all headed over to the wedding at around noon (it started at eleven, but guess how long it took three teenage girls to get ready...). Weddings are a chance to eat fancy Cambodian food, but I recommend avoiding anything uncooked as that is the surest way to get a big case of giardia or amoebic dystentary. The food was pretty good.
While my coteachers' bride and the bridesmaids and groomsmen greeted everyone and handed them a pen, my coteacher was making the rounds to cheers everyone and get drunk. When guests are finished eating and enjoying the wedding they write their name on an envelope provided and put money in it, to be deposited in a giant heart-shaped box on the way out. As a reward, you are given a stick of doublemint gum usually. By the end, when the bride and entourage were accepting money envelopes, my coteacher was dragging me onto the dance floor to dance with him in front of the camera. An important part of anyone's wedding is to dance with the barang. I stood there awkwardly, moving around a little, and wishing I had had a few beers. I asked my coteacher, "Don't you want to dance with your bride?" to which he responded, "Yes! I am surprised!" He was very drunk.
Probably the icing on the cake (of which there was none, and this is my chief and only complaint about Cambodian weddings) was watching my coteacher grab the mic from the DJ repeatedly and slur something into it that was so loud and garbled I had literally NO IDEA what he was saying. But it made all the guests really excited and feel like they needed to scream in response, so I guess it had the desired effect.





Since the music at a wedding is crazy-blow-your-eardrums-out loud the party is usually mercifully short. About two hours after our arrival, the same teacher gave us a ride home. My wedding experience was quite enjoyable and the perfect duration. My next experience would not be so brief...

Sunday, March 6, 2011

do you know how to harvest rice?

People always ask, "Do you know how to eat rice?" It really means do you eat rice, or have you eaten rice here, but for some reason that is how people phrase it in Cambodia.
Now I not only know how to eat rice, which I know a lot (how you say you know something well ex: I know Cambodia A LOT!), but also how to harvest it.
A few weekends ago (I'm catching up on old blog material since I've been busy lately) my friend Abby came to visit me at my site and the next day I went to visit her site. While at my house we made baba ghanoush and falafel. We had a lazy day other than that.
At Abby's (which is only about 30k from my site) we ate some breakfast of noam, which is like Cambodian sweet rice cake and comes in many many forms, and then went on a looong bike ride. We biked along meeting different people and stopping to chat or take pictures of interesting things. One thing we came across was this rice threshing machine. It was shooting the stalks up into the air and separating out the grains of rice. A very apropos picture of rural Cambodian life.

We kept biking and eventually the rode dead-ended into rice fields. We could see a ton of water buffalo and cows and wanted to take some pictures of them (the water buffalo are one of my favorite things in Cambodia, especially the babies). A woman offered to let us leave our bikes at her house, so we parked them and followed her into the rice paddies. She and her family and some neighbors were harvesting rice. They were almost done by the time we got there, so they let us try it. It was fun for the five minutes or so I participated, but doing it for a whole day would be back-breaking work, not to mention how incredibly hot it was out. 

WARNING: if you don't like disgusting stories about mice, stop reading now, and don't move to rural Cambodia.
After we walked out further and snapped pictures of the water buffalo we started to walk back when we saw all the people who were harvesting rice screaming and running around, beating something in the grass. I thought it might be a snake so we hung back for a minute. Turns out while harvesting rice the people had run into a whole den of mice, and were chasing after and killing them. They just kept coming and everyone, especially the young boys, were running and beating the mice with sticks and sickles or picking them up and throwing them HARD against the ground. 

















One boy was even reaching up to his elbow into a mouse hole, dragging them out by their tails, and then slamming them down from his full three feet of height to the ground.


This was one of the more disgusting things I've seen in Cambodia. The mice just kept coming! By the end the people had a basket full of at least 50 mice. One little girl was going around collecting all the dead mouse bodies by the tails. I was grossed out and also intrigued. I was standing right next to the action, which would never have happened a year ago. If you live here, you just have to become numb to rodents and other gross or scary things if you want to survive. But I digress... I kept asking why they had all the mice and whether they were going to be dinner. One woman said yes, the people would eat the mice. Another woman said no. I think she was lying because she knew it was kind of "Cambodian ghetto" to eat mice. But you gotta do what you gotta do, and I didn't see many other food sources out where they lived.



Finally we finished staring at the dead mice, and biked back to Abby's house. I have never been so sweaty and dirty in my life. 

































I don't know much about life after Peace Corps, except that priorities one and two as soon as I get off that plane are taking a shower and eating In-n-Out. Hold the mice.