New friends.

Mouy. Pii. Bei. Buon. Pram. Pram muoy. Pram pii. Pram bei. Pram buon. Dap.

That's 1-10 in Khmer. At least some variation of it.

These four tried to teach me how to count to ten today. Apparently I can't say 10 and my attempts were hilarious.

My friend is flying into Siem Reap tonight, so today I decided to rent a bike for a whopping US$2 and just ride around. I followed the road until I found a hill. There were stairs at the bottom of the hill, so what to do but climb them?

At the top of the stairs that went about half way up the hill, I found these four eating some snacks. We had a exchange of hello and smiles and I walked by them. Well they decided to follow me up the hill. A foreigner walking up the hill, nothing more interesting than that.

There was a road that wound up the hill so I kept walking up that, looking back at my little followers. More smiles and waving hello. After about 200m, one of them hid in the shade so I joined him and said "hot hot hot". Thus began them repeating everything I said in English much to my amusement. The littliest one was only five and hearing him try and repeat everything I said was hilarious. I swear it must be like what I sound like when I try to repeat things in Chinese (more like mumbling than actual sounds).

So after a lot of miming and pointing and saying "Me" and "You", I finally got their names and ages. To me, it sounded like To, Tay, Mai, and Tai, although I'm sure that's not even close. But the youngest was five, the oldest 12, and the two in the middle were 8.