Jam n Cam in Vientiane
23rd Jan 2007Crazy cross cultural camp By Cam ____________ Yesterday the water in certain villages was turned off due to roadworks. At least this time they had the good sense to put it in the newspapers before they did it. Often in Laos the water is turned off without anybody knowing. Of course it was only in the Lao language newspaper and expats such as our friend Ed were in the middle of showering - all soaped up - and then suddenly there was no water! Jamie`s school closed at 12:00 because of the water issue. I picked her up and she came home and had a good nap whilst I worked on a way to create a Guess Who game (to teach `describing people`). In the evening we drove over to Sticky Fingers where we had dinner with Ginny and Ed. After dinner we went and had a look at a bizarre show that was on in the public stage by the Mekong. There was a group of Koreans, Cambodians, Vietnamese and Laotians who belonged to some kind of cross-cultural camp. They had been showing performances from their different countries (koreans doing tae kwon do and vietnamese doing vietnamese dance). The Koreans were wearing T-shirts that said "Corea" on the back. We were wondering if this spelling error was intentional or not. Apparently Koreans are renowned for making funny mistakes with their English. I once met an English teacher who`d been working there during the world cup. As the world cup was held partially in Korea that year, there were many signs up all over the city. The teacher said that they hadn`t bothered to check their English with anyone and that instead of reading "cheer on Korea", these huge billboards read "cheer UP Korea"!!! We arrived at the very end of the show. Their last act was a song in English they`d composed together without the help of a native speaker. It was very cute. I don`t remember exactly how it went but it was something like "hello, hello, hello. We are all friend. Happiness together, don`t go away, we are all friend". Regardless of its grammatical errors it was very charming and the smiles of the performers were warm indeed. We saw one of the TAs (teaching assistants) from VIS there and she was talking to a Vietnamese girl. They spoke in Lao, and it turned out that the girl had been studying at the Lao National University for 5 months. She was training to become a Lao language teacher so that she could teach Lao back in Vietnam. Her Lao was incredibly good for just 5 months over here - Jamie and I were very jealous! As a result we`ve decided to get back into learning Lao!
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