Listen to Pilot Light

Thursday, November 22, 2012

French Chicken

As the United States is celebrating annual slaughter a turkey day, I thought it appropriate to write a column about the fool things.

Here in Cambodia there isn't a word for turkey, not exactly. The word for chicken is (badly romanized) Moan. A turkey is Barang Moan, or French chicken. However, nowadays any foreigner is call a barang and if you want to say that someone is French you have to say barang barang. So I suppose French chickens are now actually foreign chickens, if anyone wants to get that technical. There is no word for fowl, either. You just say Chicken-duck. I guess turkeys and geese don't count for much.

At any rate, here is one of our landlord's foreign chickens parading around this morning. Although they look like US turkeys (although not like butterball or other factory models), these will still be around next week. They have a longer lifespan here. Must be the weather or something in the water. At any rate, this one does not look stressed out.




Saturday, November 17, 2012

Hong Kong Redux

In October we flew to Hong Kong for a week. The trip was to serve several important purposes with seeing old friends among the most important. Tom Tsui and I worked together at Asian Sources, a publishing company, some twenty years back. Dagny and I hadn't seen Tom and his wife Miu Miu since then. They were wonderful hosts and we spent some wonderful time together.

Hong Kong is even more intense than it was when we left. We are so off the pace of that kind of life that it left us exhausted. But it was fun and we even ate ostrich (tenderloin) for the first time. 

So here are some images of us and Tom and Miu Miu and Hong Kong in general.