The Insider

Em & I hosted our first proper dinner party last week. We invited everyone in Em's team at work, so there were five of us all told, and I knocked up a few Asian dishes which seemed to go down pretty well. Two of Em's colleagues are Khmer, they both speak excellent English and it made for a really fun and interesting night. I thought a couple of random snippets of conversation were worthy of a post, so here they are...

Firstly, we've finally understood why tuk tuk & moto drivers are never able to locate our street when we ask for street 55. Phnom Penh is laid out on a numbered grid system, with the East-West streets getting even numbers (ascending from North to South) and the North-South streets getting odd numbers (ascending from the river Westwards). The French planners even had the foresight to start the Northern most "even" streets at 60 to allow for the inevitable expansion. This makes navigating around Phnom Penh really easy (although house numbering is very haphazard but that's another story). Anyway, it turns out that locals don't bother with street numbers and mostly don't know what they are. They prefer to use either the street name (a small number of streets have both a name and a number), or navigation by landmarks / places. It seems bizarre to use this method when there is a ready made numbering system but there you go.

Secondly, a bit more IT stuff. Whilst I was working, I realised that most of the computers had two languages installed - English & Khmer Unicode. Khmer uses a sanskrit based alphabet with (I think) 33 discrete characters. I didn't pay much attention though, as the keyboards were standard English QWERTY without any overlay's or dual language labelling. According to Em's work colleagues, they do produce Khmer language documents on their PC's, and when they need to do so they just use memory, or trial and error, to find the right keys. How hard must this be ? I really have a new found respect for them, working predominantly in English (their second language) and typing blind when producing anything in Khmer. A bit of internet research reveals that there are groups out there working on native Khmer keyboards (and dual language overlay's), but it doesn't appear as though these are widespread at all. Further to this, the massive explosion in mobile phones and texting has meant that a lot of young Khmer's in Phnom Penh are communicating primarily in English when texting - most phones don't support Khmer language natively. I can't help thinking that embracing a foreign language so readily in these new forms of communication may not be a good thing in the long term for nurturing Khmer language.

Anyway, the dinner party was a great success and we've resolved to try to do more entertaining.