I Play Games

My family is big into games, both board and card. We had a big bookcase filled with different games in our house. My mom loves to tell the story of how I was able to beat my great grandmother at Uno when I was three. At family gatherings we almost always wind up playing Rummikub or Scrabble. It turns out that people in Southeast Asia love to play games also. There is this strip of open-air bars at Patong ("where women are men and men go wrong" - a little Jack Johnson interlude) Beach in Phuket, Thailand and people play games while drinking all night long. Two very popular games: Jenga and this game that consists of holding a hammer upside down and attempting to be the first to pound a nail into a tree stump. I know, hammers & drunk people should never mix. Anyway, I loved that there were people playing games everywhere. And to comment, Jenga is definitely harder to play when you have had a few kamikaze shots.

I had a party last night. (So so so fun. A great crowd of interesting & fun people turned out.) Anyway, earlier this week I went to the store to buy some playing cards for the party, and ended up spending some time in the game aisle. I made two discoveries:

1. Clue is called Cluedo here. Same box. Same Colonel Mustard, only a different name.
And
2. Othello (which if I remember correctly, I was slightly ridiculed for buying at a yard sale a few years back. It was $.50 - a total steal! Haters.) is called O-hello! I find this very amusing. The exclamation point is part of the name, not just for emphasis.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why they would change the names. So strange.

Also odd was that the store was playing the reggaeton song "Kulo" (maybe not the real name. The one that goes "Esta tan linda...tiene tremendo kulo!), which roughly translated means that this cute girl has a big booty. So they're playing this song (which can also be found on the wonderful CD Verano en la Playa) that is not exactly elevator shopping music, but they're also censoring it. Everytime they say the word 'kulo,' (which happens a lot) it is blocked out. I know that I am in Singapore and that they censor absolutely everything, but there are probably five people in this country who speak Spanish. (I know this because when Linzuf & I go out, we speak Spanish to people, which is how we met three of the five spanish speakers - Johnny Panama, his colleague Oscar Miami, and Canadian Gym Teacher. I am confident that we will know everyone on the island who speaks Spanish before the end of the year). So it was a pretty ridiculous song choice to begin with, but the blanks in the song made it even weirder and to top it all off, it almost made me want to start shaking my kulo in the game aisle. O-hello! Gotta love S'pore.