lao lethargy

hanoi water puppet theater

I can't take credit for filming this but I did have the great pleasure of witnessing one of these shows last night. A thousand year old tradition in rural Vietnam, preserved by a company in Hanoi.

Phnom Penh

saigon shuffle

Uncle Ho

More soon from my Indochinese travels. For now all the best and I am still somewhat in disbelief that I made it here.

Meat Eats Dogs

Forget Klingon for a minute. Can you think of an ethnic group of people who literally speak backwards? This was thought to be a myth before missionary/linguist Desmond Derbyshire stumbled upon the Hixkaryana tribe in Guyana.
The Hixkaryana are a relatively small group even today, and what so amazed Derbyshire, and soon the entire linguistic community, was that these people followed an OVS version of syntax, that being object/verb/subject. Before the Hixkaryana's language was documented, this particular order was thought to be nonexistent in human communication, in stark contrast to the English language's SVO order: John (the subject) grabbed (verb) the ball (object). The Hixkaryana would say roughly an analog of "The ball grabbed John", but of course would mean the opposite to our ears.
This object-initial form of language is still quite rare, and most of the handful of tongues that share this peculiar sentence structure reside in the Amazon. Derbyshire proved though, that they weren't just a fictional academic antithesis, and he spent a good part of his life working with the Hixkaryana and other Carib tribes. He passed away in 2007.

TV Eye