Hot damn, it sure has been a while, hasn't it? It took me some time to recover sufficiently from the incident I'm about to describe for you. Our local boss had invited us to the Ancestor's Festival. For those who would like to know about the festival's roots, please check out http://wilckeweitweg.blogspot.com/ for further information.
Anyways, we first got picked up to visit the pagoda, and then went to the boss's summer cottage out in the country for a Cambodian barbecue. Annette went off to join the women in the preparations for the barbecue, and our boss was upstairs for business with some bigwigs from Europe. So, I was all on my own with the locals who didn't speak one bit English, smiling uneasily and feeling as out of place and useless as tits on a boar hog.
After a while I gathered my courage and sat down at the low table on the patio of the small house and shyly said my How-do-you-do in Cambodian. The old men gathered at the table nodded at me gravely and after a while one of them gestured to one of the girls to fetch me a glass, filled it with ice and beer and then raised his glass at me. I murmured "Cheers, gentlemen.", we clinked our glasses all around and drank. He then called for one of the boys, said something to him and then send him off with a not-too-gentle slap on the back.
The boy ran off and disappeared into a house 200 ft or so down the road. We sat in silence and waited. Quite frankly, I was scared of these guys, who apparently were veterans of the civil war. Their faces were scarred, one was missing most of his left arm, another was wearing an eye-patch and they neither smiled nor spoke. After a while the boy returned with a young man perhaps in his early 30s, who introduced himself as Henry, the local English teacher. Henry obviously wasn't too happy to serve as a translator, and politely refused the beer he was offered, opting for tea instead. This earned him a sneer from the eye-patch guy and a general round of contemptuous looks from the rest of the men. Finally Mr.Eye-patch asked him a question, which seemed to discomfit him even further. He struggled for a long time before he translated for me the old guy's 3 questions, which were why did I wear earrings, what did I think about Cambodia, and what did I think about the civil war and it's soldiers.
It didn't take any rocket science to know that I was in a tight spot. Tight, tight, tight. In order to buy some time I reached for the beer, filled all the glasses at the table, mine last, slowly raised it and started out with a careful praise of Cambodia, a country that was waking up after a long and dark night, rubbing it's eyes, new day rising, bloody bla-bla-bla, you can see where I was going. When he had translated that bit I saluted them with my glass and drained it in one go. Again, they nodded gravely with only the slightest hint of approval, the glasses were refilled, and another round of silence ensued. I then went on to answer the question about my earrings, saying that I had once been a foolish young man, forgetting the face of my father, acting rebellious, that I had since overcome this silliness, but had kept the earrings to remind me of my own mistakes. After our increasingly uncomfortable translator had finished explaining my answer, I didn't wait for any replies and went off on an elaborate speech about men and their mistakes, how they could never be undone, and how a man had to live with them. I paused for our shaky translator to do his work. The eyes of the men were all fixed on me, hard and not too kind indeed. I took a sip of my beer, and then said how there was no shame in any mistake or in those who committed them, but only in those who tried to deny their mistakes, or worse, in those who hadn't been there and now offered their shameless judgment and hindsight to those who had been there without the comfort and safety of these civilized times. By the time I had finished I was sweating like a hog. The teacher, ever more reluctantly translated the last bit, and again a moment of tense silence ensued. Finally, Mr Eye-patch got up, slowly walked up to me, and when I rose, clapped me on the shoulder, shook my hand and nodded approvingly. And then all hell broke loose. Within a few minutes I had to drain glass after glass of ice cold beer to salute each and every one of them, and then cheap Mekong whiskey was fetched and poured into the glasses. Our translator managed to quietly slink away, while I was cheered at and slapped on the back with all the glasses being constantly refilled. I was finally saved by Annette, who played the role of the angry wife surprisingly well, which got another round of laughter and winks and back-slapping from the guys.
"You owe me." was all she whispered in my ear while she carefully helped me into the backseat of the car.
We had to stop several times on the back for me to reimburse the cheap red-eye eating through my poor intestines. I spent the following two days as sick as a puppy on our bed, drinking only cold tea and carefully nibbling on dry bread-crusts. Our boss payed me a visit and chided me as heavily as Asian understatement would allow him to. I promised that I had sure learned my lesson and would from now on stick to the occasional beer in the evening and never to embarrass him again. He then said that I was forgiven since I was just a young grasshopper without the experience of his years, and reminded me to also apologize to my kind and forgiving wife. I'm not so sure about the forgiving part, but, hell, I sure thank the lord every day of my life that she keeps putting up with my shenanigans. I know that I'm one hell of a lucky guy, and I sure know that I haven't done much to deserve it.
Sela.
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