Rice? Rice.

The greatest thing about being immersed (stuck?) in another culture is that every interaction has the potential to be a joke, since there's always a chance that your tenuous grasp on the foreign language will slip, creating hilarity at someone's expense. The problem with this is two-fold:

Whenever I say something hilarious in Malay, I don't understand it. Likewise, when someone else says something hilarious in English, I'm usually the only one who gets it. An example of the former which happens every day (translated):

Lunch Lady: Rice?
Me: Rice.
Lunch Ladies (Laughing heartily): Ah, Rice!

I think it might be as if you asked your dog if he wanted kibble and he responded in the affirmative and in a language that didn't consist mainly of barks and growls. That might be understating it. Maybe it'd be like asking your pet plant if it wanted water, or your pet rock if it liked being a rock and having them address you in Elizabethan English. The problem of course being, if a rock learned just enough Olde English to say what it wanted to say then many of the responses it received would fall on deaf, rocky ears. As it stands I can give orders and ask questions but when they're met with anything more than a simple "yes" or "no" (and actually a nod or shake of the head is much better) I'm pretty screwed. As a result I have no specific information on why I'm so accidentally hilarious to the Malay world, other than the first hand experience of how accidentally hilarious the Malay world is to me.

Yesterday I was trying to lock some video equipment back in the teacher's lounge after a pretty successful screening of Happy Feet (I've found that CG penguins are much better English teachers than I can ever hope to be. As soon as I can find Surf's Up, it's next.) when the guard whose key it was was on the level below me and Sarah was standing in the parking lot where we both could see her. Regardless of whatever we tried to say in Malay or English (or Manglish, we were desperate) the guard stayed on his level and tried to get Sarah to come up. Finally I got him to come up and lock the door for me, since I guess you needed a special kind of touch.

As far as I can surmise, I'm pretty sure the guard thought that I was trying to lock Sarah in room and I was clearly struggling with it.

Guard: Oh, you're trying to lock her in the room? I think I see your problem. You see, she's all the way down there. If you want to lock her in the room, you need her to be in the room first before you lock it. I've made this mistake before. I know how to fix it. Hey, you down there, can you come up to the room? He wants to lock you inside and he's having a helluva time doing it while you're down there.

The other weekend we had to pay for parking since we parked our car in order to go to the Perhentian Islands. We got a bit overcharged.

Sarah (after paying, while smiling): We'll never come here again, but thank you!
Parking Guy: (Smiling and nodding) Yes!

2.5 hours ago we arrived in KL on the night bus from Kuala Berang. We got in at the ungodly hour of 4:00 am (ironically, very close to the morning prayer), and took a cab from the bus station to the lodge where we were staying. The guy refused to bargain and held firm at 15 RM, since it was after midnight. The meter was actually running and only got up to 5 RM but when it came time to pay, the taxi driver simply hit the meter until it turned off then smiled at me. I just laughed, then he gestured with his hand moving to his mouth.

"Yeah, yeah, your family's gotta eat," I said.

Rice?
Rice.

(Riotous laughter ensues.)

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