A week or so ago, one of the staff members here asked me if I ate dinner yet. I told him yes, but he said I should go with him to eat again. I said No no, I'm okay, but he insisted that I go. I think he said something about barbeque, and that meant at least meat and/or lots of Khmae people hanging around each other, so I figured I'd go with him. Two other boys from the orphanage came with us.
It turns out that Khmae barbeque is basically Korean style barbeque with American foods. You get a gas grill right on your table that you can control, and they give you plates of vegetables and meat and some spices, and you just throw whatever meat and veggies you want on there for a couple minutes and cook them, then eat them. Like a hot-pot thing, but not a pot, just a grill. It was pretty tasty, and also extremely cheap - less than about $2 per person, and that was with a big jug of beer for all the people except for me.
Well when my two friends from China came to visit, they asked me if there was anywhere I knew that I thought they would like, and I told them about Khmae barbeque like I just wrote here, and they said that sounded good. I told the staff guy that my friends wanted to go, and he could come with us, but we just wanted the name and the location of the barbeque place he had taken us to before so we could go there. He said okay, I'll take you to an even better place. I said, No, no, we absolutely don't want a different place, we want to go exactly where we went before. I was pretty sure he understood.
So anyway, the night finally comes around when I'm supposed to go with my two friends, and the other female volunteer here comes along as well. I think that made the staff guy a little confused, but he went along with it. We finally got there, waaaaay later than we had planned, and my two friends are waiting. I can see that this is certainly NOT the place that we had gone before. They approach me and say, "Um... this place looks really scary. I don't think we want to eat here." I look over. It is definitely a brothel. I mean, it's a restaurant as well and they serve food and alcohol for sure, but you can tell just from the way the girls were dressed that it was also a red-light establishment. To be honest, the girls weren't dressed any more suggestively than American girls would be in a college town on a Friday night, but even that is a very clear red flag. Khmae girls don't dress like that unless they work in a certain business, and we didn't really want to be around it.
Aside from that, I'm pretty upset at our staff guy. "Dude, I said I wanted to go exactly where we went before." And he says, "Yeah... this is beer garden." "What?" "This is beer garden." I think I finally understand. "I didn't want beer garden, I wanted a barbeque. The one where you took me before. With the two other boys. Like I said." To be clear: I was extremely straightforward when I told him what I wanted before that night. I think that he just didn't want to understand. And I can only imagine his surprise when not only did the female volunteer tag along, but then he found out that my two Chinese friends were also girls.
Anyway, he flagged down a tuk-tuk for us and told us that he had told the driver to go to a Khmae barbeque place, so we piled in and just talked as he drove us around the city. It was taking a long time, and my newest Chinese friend started to joke about, "He is going to sell us!" I made a joke about her being worth the most, then my other Chinese friend got upset with me. Haha. Eventually the first one continued, "...at first I was just joking but now I think I am serious!" But it was okay, of course, it was just that the staff guy once again didn't know what he was doing and/or neither did the driver, and eventually he just pulled to the side of the road and said, "Okay!" We were in the middle of a street with no restaurant nearby, and certainly not the kind we wanted. So I made this face:
and told him this was not acceptable and we wanted to go to a Khmae barbeque restaurant. We couldn't communicate and he asked me to call my staff friend, but I didn't have his number. So he called a dispatcher who spoke good English, and we finally worked things out, and about ten minutes later we finally made it to a good, legit BBQ establishment. It had been about 90 minutes since we left the orphanage.
The food was really good, and between the four of us, with all that we ate and four bottles of water, the total bill was exactly $7.
Peace out.
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