Grilled Rice in a Leaf

Responding to comments:

(sigh) I am going to need a couple more people to respond to my little survey in order to make this survey a survey… so I am going to extend this survey until Monday or Tuesday and see if more people respond to my poll. You don’t need to leave a long explanation, you can just write, “Yes, Simile” or “Not Simile” in a comment. When you leave the comment for the survey, try to remember to leave it on the entry “Survey Concerning Similes” thank you.

George: I am still conducting the survey, as you have noted by now. We will see what else people have to say.

Micah: glad you made it all the way through. I will be curious to see how long this thing is at the end of the summer. You know, copy it into a word document and see how many pages it takes up. I have written a small book, and when you get behind, that is a lot of reading to do.

Thanks for your comments concerning similes. I agree with you.

Official blog entry:

On the way over here I passed the little… what do you call it… a restaurant? not really. It’s a little building without walls made with a table and some chairs for eating at and another little area where food is prepared. It is directly next door to the office. So I walk past it every day. As I walked past it, today two of my students from the office were sitting there. I said hello, and they invited me over to try some of what they were eating. It was a Lao desert. Sticky rice with coconut milk wrapped into some leaves, and then grilled over some coals. You take off the leaves, and you eat the rice (when you unwrap the rice it is all stuck together and is dry enough for you to hold in your hands and eat it like a soft candy bar without getting your hands all messy). It was quite good, but nothing absolutely spectacular either.

Today is Saturday, and I have just been enjoying my day off, relaxing, listening to music as I do little odds and ends in my room. At 5:30 I will join “the girls” for badminton, and on Sunday, they invited me to come with them to some sort of wedding party. From what I understand this is the party after the wedding. We will go, eat food, and congratulate the newly weds. It should be an interesting experience.

This afternoon I had a fun and interesting experience, the man who takes care of Jay’s house came and knocked on my door and when I answered it he said, “speak English” I didn’t really understand what he meant at first, then I realized he wanted to practice speaking English. He can’t make sentences, but he knows a few words or short phrases in English.
He first started with numbers—holding up his fingers, “one, two, four.”
“three” I corrected
“tree”
“th-ree”
He contorted his face, “thuree”
we continued, “four, fi.”
“FiVe” I said emphasizing the “v”
“Fi-Va”
“no just five”
“fiva, fiva, fi, fiva” he said, either trying to stop saying the “a” at the end, or not noticing the difference between what I said and what he said. I don’t’ know which one it was.
”close”
We continued with numbers, and tried to communicate some other things. It was like playing a game of charades.
Drink, water, eat, rain, America, twenty-one, forty-eight, etc.
I didn’t look at my watch when he came in, so I have no certain idea of how long we sat there working on words, but I would guess it was somewhere between forty minutes and an hour. It was kind of fun, and a different style than teaching a class, but I used some of the same techniques, such as writing the word and underlining the part he didn’t pronounce correctly. After a while we ran out of things to say, so he got up and left.

Have a nice weekend.

-Luke