Some days...

You just have to quit.

Prahok is a common Cambodian seasoning, often used in soups. It's earned the nickname "Khmer cheese", though I have not been able to figure out why. A quick look at wikipedia tells me it's a paste made from fermented fish and something else, and well, either way --

It was in the soup I had for lunch, and I am not a happy camper. 

I'm including this in the blog because it's part of it. Tomorrow marks the end of my second month here, and the previous two have been one long adjustment process, whether it be in attitude, culture, body, mind, spirit, etc. 

People are not standing on their heads here, but the world is literally upside-down. My students have started friending me on Facebook and it's making me wonder what their lives are like, have been like, will be like. I don't know, and probably never will, know what their day to day existence is like, and nor them, mine. That doesn't mean we aren't or can't be friends, or that we aren't more similar than probably either of us would think. 

It just does make me think, at times like this, when I am feeling really far from home and projecting my anger at the over-fermented prahok onto the country as a whole, which isn't fair at all but hey, let's talk more tomorrow. My day to day life is not ridiculously altered, but yet fundamentally, it is. 

Sometimes it's a lot like home. Sometimes it's not. And sometimes I sit back and think and realize that no, everything is different here. 

My sympathetic co-worker said it like this, "Some foreigners can't take the Khmer cheese."

That is what I am here, a foreigner. As always when I make statements like that, I don't mean it in a bad way. It's just the way it is. It is foreign to me and I am foreign to it. 

Even getting used the fact of being a foreigner is foreign. The circles never end, and sometimes it gets really tiring. If everything was the same, but people stood on their heads, I think it might be less strange. 

I am literally on the other side of the world, and most of the time I don't really notice. Gravity works the same here, after all. But some days, I do, and others, I'm forced to. 

All part of the adventure, as much as I wish sometimes it weren't. But if it wasn't...well, of course it wouldn't be the same, now would it?

UPDATE: By the evening the prahok had found its way out, and I was able to munch on bread and rice for dinner. I am now sitting in my fantastic little solar, playing stupid computer games, and am back to being okay with life. It doesn't change the point of this post, but I thought you might want to know.