I busied myself at lunchtime, trying to concoct a passable vegetarian samlor machu - a Khmer sour soup. This owes a lot to Vietnamese tamarind-based soups, called canh chua. However, while Vietnamese uses the Latin alphabet, making the search for recipes much easier on the internet, finding a consistent transliteration of សម្លម្ជូរ is difficult. Nobody can decide whether it's samlar machou, samlor mju, samlo mchour, salaw machu, or salor ma-chu. So, I made it up as I went along.
What we ended up with was a soup with various elements of citrus sourness from tamarind, lemongrass, galangal, and lime leaves. Palm sugar added an orangey note of sweetness. Technically, I think the soup should have contained tomato and pineapple to boost the sweet-sour flavours, but lacking these, I used pumpkin for sweetness and mushrooms for the glutamic acids they contain (this is responsible for the umami taste that is concentrated in food such as parmesan and kombu). Tofu, pak choi and rice noodles made the soup a meal, and we enjoyed it with a raw green papaya salad. This kind of soup doesn't suffer so much from the paucity of flavour from which thin vegetable soups often suffer, as the sour taste is so pronounced. When the flavour of a soup is more delicately balanced between the five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, unami), the lack of one of them is more noticeable.
Having made our way sweatily into town, we continued the Khmer lessons we started last weekend. These are, by necessity, a little haphazard, as the teacher never knows how many students she will have and must cater for their varying levels. A lesson plan isn't really an option, so the class is led by the needs of those people there. We asked the teacher to translate useful phrases and worked on some vocabulary to do with time. This is useful for putting off the impatient tuk-tuk drivers until tomorrow (thngai saek). The vocabulary and pronunciation is the most challenging part. This is because of the tendency to cluster consonants together without vowels between them - the word for 'I' (khnhom), ខ្ញុំ, is a combination of two consonants, ខ (kh) and a subscript of ញ (nh), plus a couple of other marks for the final om sound.
Another challenge is the unusual vowel sounds. In the phrase "I go" (khnhom tow), we all found the vowel sound in the word 'to go' (ទៅ) extremely hard to reproduce. The word is a combination of the consonant ទ (a t sound) and the vowel ៅ, which has two parts that go either side of the consonant! This vowel contains a sound that is apparently used mostly in Indo-European languages and is notated as 'ɨw' in the IPA (sadly a phonetic alphabet and not a means of representing the hop character in pale ales).
Further challenges arise from the Khmer's use of the glottal stop as a meaningful sound, with its own representation in the alphabet (អ). For example, the word for 'tomorrow', which I mentioned above, contains ស្អ, a combination of sa (ស) and a subscript of the glottal stop character. If that weren't enough, final consonants in Khmer are often swallowed and become glottal stops - so the 'k' on the end of thngai saek is not pronounced. This explains why we have heard cries of "motobai!" (rather than motorbike) when being offered a lift. Fortunately, the Khmer grammar is surprisingly easy (something had to be) and seemingly involves no conjugation of verbs, instead using auxiliary words to communicate tense, such as in 'khnhom ban tow' (I went) and 'khnhom nung tow' (I will go).
Having fried our brains with the Khmer language, we went for some good old-fashioned entertainment at Phare Cambodian Circus.
The circus was held in a genuine big top and told a ghost story, in which a group of students are visited by a pair of supernatural, and very acrobatic, apparitions. In an attempt to scare away the spirits, the six kids perform impressive and gravity-defying stunts of their own.
The performance whipped along at a frenetic pace helped by live accompaniment from traditional instruments. The young performers come from difficult social and economic backgrounds and have learned circus skills at an institution founded by survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime. It was an inspiring, funny and impressive display.
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