Sunday, May 8, 2016

Got The Crowd A Laughing!!

The only good thing about the dog pee thingy was I got a  large group of dump family people laughing loudly as a result. It is kind of weird to be able to make people laugh when you cannot speak their language but that happened today. It went like this.

After the peeing incident I was doing a portrait of the groom in front of his lean-two when a white dog (the peeing dog?) walked by. The groom speaks a bit of Thai, so I told him how the dog peed on my bag (Ma, Chee Bon Grau-bao Khong-pom). He did not seem to understand everything so I acted it out, pointed to the dog, my bag, then the road behind me then lifted up my leg like a dog does when he pees. The groom immediately got and it and started laughing. I did not know it but a group of 6 or 7 people behind me were also watching my performance. They all started laughing out loud. They began speaking and joking  in Burmese telling those that did not get it initially, what the joke was.

Everyone really got into it and for the next 3-4 minutes there was animated talk with everyone laughing. I did not know the people would/could laugh so loud and so long, there is not a lot of humor working in a garbage dump. After things subsided a bit, I acted it out again lifting my leg a second time and pretended to be angry at what the dog had done and everyone started laughing and joking once again. The whole group thought it was the funniest thing, they pointed to the road the dog and my bag and smiled big toothy red stained teeth grins and laughed very loudly.

Hate the idea I still have dog pee on my camera bag. But the joking and fun afterward lessoned the stench somewhat. I can still see everyone laughing, gesturing and telling the dog pee story to each other. Guess some things are funny in every culture and in every language, even goofy body language. A nice memory.