Interesting things said today:

1. One of my really strong English students asked me what the opposite of democracy was. I told him dictatorship. After discussing the word, he told me the Khmer word for dictatorship: communiss (I think it’s French since a lot of technical words in Khmer come from French or English). In America, we generally associate communism with dictatorship, but my student skipped all the details, as I imagine many Cambodians do. On the other hand, I’ve spoken to Cambodians who think communism is great. One friendly guy in a taxi to Phnom Penh couldn’t stop talking about how great everything was in Bulgaria when he was there in the 1980’s.

2. At a wedding tonight, everyone sitting at my table pointed out that there was another non-Asian person at another table. “Like Jeremy,” they said, but literally the only thing I had in common with this guy physically was that I wasn’t Asian. Can you imagine being at an American wedding and telling a minority that there is another minority at another table?