A Wicked Pisser

On this gray and rainy Thursday morning Shanti and were having our Khmer lesson as scheduled. The lessons, which we're taking three mornings a week for one hour, have been going really well. Our teacher, Sokha, is one of several Cambodians that have been teaching new Peace Corps volunteers Khmer and also teaches English. He's very enthusiastic, a good teacher, and quite cute to boot.

Anyways, today we were learning numbers - theoretically we can count to a billion now - and the issue of pronounciation came up. Sokha told us that in different parts of Cambodia, and in particular Siem Reap (which is where Cambodia's famed Angkor Wat is located) words are pronounced in different ways. This sparked an entire discussion on different American accents, most notably the South and the Midwest. Out of nowhere, however, Sokha said something which Shanti and I recognized only after it was repeated a few times. When we realized that he was, in fact, saying "wicked pisser," we could not stop laughing. A cute, nearly 30 year-old Cambodian repeating the Boston staple "wicked pisser" over and over again. Ah globalization...