Funniest Thing for January

Tell ITN about the funniest thing that ever happened to you while traveling in a foreign country. There are no restrictions on length. (ITN prints no info on destinations in the U.S., Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean.) The ITN staff will choose each month’s winner, who will receive a free one-year subscription to ITN. Entries not chosen cannot be acknowledged.

This month’s winner is CLAUDIA REED of Las Vegas, Nevada:

While in Cambodia in April ’03, we hired a great guide by the name of Sri Roth to take us to Angkor Wat. During that visit, my husband and his brother were discussing some foreign food they had tasted. They couldn’t agree on what it tasted like, so my husband ended the discussion with, “Oh, it just tasted like chicken.”

Roth asked what that meant and my husband tried to explain our colloquialism to her, but you could tell she was totally in the dark about what he meant.

Roth took us to a lake where they were catching fish which would be put in stone vats and left to ferment for nine months. The vats each have a hole in the bottom, and once the liquid drains out it is bottled as fish sauce. The fish parts that are left are dried, cut into squares and sold as “fish cheese,” Roth told us.

My husband asked her what it tasted like and she, very dryly, said, “It tastes a lot like chicken.”