Miss Manners

Picture this. Tiffany, Tara, Deidre, Kelsey and I are sitting at the United States Embassy eating lunch in the atrium. If there’s one place to be on your best behavior, the United States Embassy is probably it. Spending an afternoon on “American soil” proved to us all just how native we’ve gone … and how badly we’re in denial about it.

Our Program Training Officer, Cheryl, organized a lunch at the Embassy for all the volunteers and our counterparts to kick off the CamTESOL Conference we attended last weekend. We got to meet the new Ambassador, tour the embassy, and talk to people who actually wear suits on a daily basis. The Embassy was beautiful, the food was delicious, and there was air conditioning. Oh yes, and the bathrooms looked exactly like the kind you find in Barnes & Noble (except nicer). There is nothing – and I mean NOTHING – like stainless steel. The whole day was an absolute treat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The day before was my birthday and I have to admit, it was a birthday to remember. To my surprise, the administrative staff ordered a cake to kick off my special day. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any better, I realized my best friends had tricked me into believing they weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary … until they surprised me with my second (this time homemade) cake of the day AND a dinner out at a swanky French restaurant followed by drinks at a posh rooftop bar. After 6 months of pinching pennies and living on a shoestring, we all cut loose and brought in my 23rd year in style.

That being said, between the cake, the copious amount of food, and never-ending free birthday drinks, I – along with everyone else to some degree or another – was feeling pretty miserable the next day. But if there’s one thing a Peace Corps Volunteer never does: it’s miss the opportunity for a really really good meal … because you never know when you might be eating boiled fish for the next week.

The girls and I had just finished our meal when we began talking about how funny it’s going to be when we go back to the States and have tablecloths on a regular basis, multiple eating utensils for each course of our meals, and need to follow basic table manners again. Somewhere during the course of this conversation, Deidre got up to get some cheesecake. When she came back, she sat down looking stunned and said, “you know, I think it’s going to be more of a shock than I thought,” and started laughing. Apparently, while she was waiting in line for her dessert she pushed in front of an Embassy staff member. Not uncommon by Cambodian standards, but probably not so much for the man she just cut off. He kindly nodded to her and said, “oh, excuse me” as if it were somehow his fault that she pushed him out of the way and not hers. She took one look at him and turned on her heel and walked away – questioning why he would doubt her lack of queuing skills. I mean, who queues in Cambodia?? Oops.

We were all laughing at Deidre’s faux-pas, when I abruptly stopped what I was doing and shrieked. I was so caught up with Deidre’s story I didn’t realize I had taken my chopsticks out of my bowl and was absentmindedly wiping them clean on the white linen tablecloth. Thank God my mother wasn’t there to see me. Of course, this sent us into more hysterical fits of laughter. We finally decided that as long as we weren’t loading food into our purses, we had probably not hit our low point yet. Although Tiffany did tell the Ambassador she’d be happy to come back to the Embassy strictly to use the bathroom again.

This behavior might seem odd to you, but we live in a world where it’s okay to sit on the ground for dinner and wear flip-flops to work. Casual is just one way of looking at it.