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October 18, 2008
Fun and Interesting Knowledge
One of the best things about teaching at the Royal University of Phnom Penh is the opportunity it gives me to get to know Cambodia in a much deeper and more fulfilling way than I would have if I just came through here as a tourist. The smallest conversational turns can teach me things I definitely wouldn't have learned otherwise.
I had lunch the other day with an Australian professor in the RUPP Chemistry department, who mentioned that one of his colleagues had written his master's thesis on the chemistry of prahoc. Prahoc is the fermented fish paste that forms the basis of most Cambodian dishes. It's been said that "You're not Cambodian if you don't eat Prahoc." It's similar to the Vietnamese fish sauce mam tom, but smellier. Anyway, the actual process of making prahoc involves a lot of steps dictated mostly by tradition. Basically, they salt the fish over several days, which kills all the normal bacteria that would otherwise cause it to rot, and then letting it be for a while, which gives time for a certain class of halophilic bacteria (salt-loving bacteria) proliferate, working all sorts of strange and interesting biochemical transformations on the fish. Eventually you get a protein-rich paste that won't go bad, but smells horrible before you cook it, mostly due to trace amounts of cadaverine present. Normally it's diluted with water to use as a sauce, and when you cook it all the bad smell burns off. And thanks to a chance conversation, I now know far more about food fermentation than I really need to.
Another interesting bit of cultural learning came up on thursday when my low-intermediate class and I were working with the present perfect tense (have seen, have gotten, etc.) I was asking if anyone had ever seen a ghost. It seemed a reasonable question, since many Khmer believe in ghosts, and they had mentioned them before when we were discussing Pchum Ben, the buddhist festival of the dead. (During Pchum Ben, they go to the pagoda and honor the spirits of their ancestors and other "poor ghosts," throw rice for them, etc.) One of the students said that yes, he had seen a ghost. It happened when he was a little kid going "to the sweet shop, to buy sweets." He saw a great big fat man, the biggest he had ever seen, going from one tree to another. The man had no legs and no face, but a full head of hair. Apparently this ghost was a tai horng, the ghost of someone who had died by accident. Cambodians seem to classify ghosts by how the person died; simple ghosts are people who died by old age or sickness, and preay ghosts are of women who died in childbirth. They have long fingernails, big eyes, long hair, a long tongue, and blood everywhere. They are one of the most feared kinds of ghosts.
Then they asked me about ghosts in America. They probably asked partly out of curiosity and partly because students who have TV have the Discovery and National Geographic channels, which often have fun pseudoscience programs about ghost hunters to fill out their schedule. So I imagine that to someone trying to grok American culture from its TV, ghosts and aliens would probably seem pretty important.
I explained that more people in cambodia believed in ghosts than in America, but that yes, some people did believe in ghosts. I explained that American ghosts are not typified by how they died, at least as far as I knew, and that oftentimes American ghosts are site-specific; this led me to explain the verb "to haunt." I talked about the idea of "unfinished business" that often surrounds a ghost's haunting, and mentioned that my mother might have seen a ghost once.
Then they asked me about dracula, and I had to tell them that vampires were only on TV, though I did explain the basics of how they work, so that they can better enjoy the movies.
Posted by flynn at October 18, 2008 2:04 PM
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Comments
Huh? What ghost? Where? Are you confusing real life and Ghostbusters? To the Ecto-1!
Posted by: Ann at October 20, 2008 5:24 AM
Did the Hotel Conneaut come up in this discussion?
Posted by: Brendan at October 24, 2008 6:14 AM
But I never claimed to have seen a ghost at the Hotel Conneaut.
Posted by: Ann at October 24, 2008 3:32 PM
Ask Charlie about our Ghost experiences while at Conneaut.
Posted by: Barbara at November 1, 2008 9:53 AM