Frustrating day

So when learning a language sometimes things are not always clear between your counterpart and you.  Thus begins my frustrating day with the host family.  I wake up in the morning and do the morning routine of breakfast and shower, then head to class.  When I return there are people everywhere at my house, I say hello to a few familiar faces and head to my room.  Out of the blue comes this feeling that this would be a great time to practice Khmer.

I go back downstairs and try to have some simple conversation with a few of the people and they are bombarding me with questions; Where are you from? Are you married? How many people in your family?  I answer the first couple easily enough and begin to feel pretty confident so I begin to ask them the same questions.  Blank stares.

After pronouncing the words in different ways I decide that its just not working and want to head back upstairs to do some work.  So I'm on my way to my room when I am stopped by my host mom and what I believe is her sister.  They ask if I have already eaten and I tell them yes and thank them but they proceed to feed me what I can only be describe as a banana tamale.

I begin to eat it and quickly realize I don't like it, but there is such hope in their faces I decide to take a few more bites and tell them I'm full.  While I'm trying to eat this thing my mom is asking me question using words and phrases that I am hopeless to translate.  She politely looks at me after every question and waits for my answer which is "ot yool" (I don't understand).

Most people would quickly figure out that I am not a native speaker and vocabulary is limited, but my well to do mother repeats the question using the same words and phrases. "ot yool".  Same question asked in the same way.  "ot yool".  Same question. "ot yool".  At this point I am laughing because I don't understand what she is trying to say and in my head I picture someone trying to describe the color red to a person who is colorblind.

Before she can ask a fifth time I manage to navigate through and get to my room to call my LCF.  My LCF comes over and translates what she was trying to ask into "do you know how to walk a cow?"

Just a little bit of frustration and a lot of communication problems but that is the life I come to know.