Mystery Meat

Besides the wats, the other part of this week’s Pchum Ben I have seen is that families all get together and come back ‘home,’ wherever that happens to be. Now that I have been here a week and a half, I have met five of my mom’s seven siblings and lots of cousins. It was quite a lucky break because a couple of my cousins who study in Phnom Penh speak quite good English. Being the only native English speaker around, it is a special treat to be able to chat about more than what you ate for breakfast and how many siblings you have.

The penultimate day of Pchum Ben meant a big get-together for my whole family. And, my family decided, there could be no better way to celebrate than to deconstruct an unidentified creature in the backyard. I came downstairs from my afternoon ‘nap’ to find my mom and assorted relatives all hanging out on the back stoop, chopping up various bits of anatomy. They told me a word in Khmer that I did not understand, and my mom assured me it was not pork, beef, or chicken, so it should be fine for me to eat. The concept of vegetarianism is very foreign in Cambodia, to say the least. To be helpful, one of my cousins fished into one of the bowls of meat and held up a severed head for me to see. At first I thought it was an eel. Eel is fairly common in the markets here, and we’d even had eel the other night for dinner. I had managed to avoid most of that, serving myself the banana flower chunks from the eel soup instead, until my mom said I hadn’t eaten enough and plopped a big slice of eel into my rice bowl. But no. I had told my cousin the English word for eel, and he assured me this was not it. Then I thought maybe it was some sort of reptile, although it looked awfully slimy. Then I spotted a ribcage tossed to the side. Less of a ribcage and more of a...shell. Yep, my dictionary confirmed it – it was a turtle shell. Oy vey...and what could I do but smile and nod. I will leave the rest to your imagination.
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Khmanglish of the week

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