Five Peculiar Stories: Love Overseas

Nerve readers weigh in this time with romantic adventures from strange lands.

By Nerve Readers

Leah Johnson

The Moto Driver

When I was in college, I visited Cambodia with my best friend's family. Her parents immigrated to America in the late 1970s, and the majority of their relatives were still living in Cambodia, but since there wasn't really room for us to sleep with any of them, we ended up staying in a hotel. Outside the hotel, there were always motorbike drivers (or “motos,” as they called them) lined up waiting to take tourists around Phnom Penh.

One in particular was very cute, but I had no idea how to tell him I thought that, since neither of us spoke the other's language. I don't exactly remember how our mutual attraction was communicated. It might have been one of my friend's older brothers who told him, or maybe it was just the amount of eye contact we had and the fact that he would turn down other customers in favor of waiting outside the hotel until my group needed a ride. Whatever it was, our relationship was solidified one night when I decided to go back to the hotel on my own. He picked me up and on the way there, he turned around (while still driving) and kissed me.

For the next week, the last one I was there, he slept in my hotel bed every night. I stopped spending time with the family I had traveled there with and instead spent the rest of my visit traveling around on his moto, trying to communicate with him. He introduced me to his family and his English tutor. Mainly though, our relationship consisted spending time in my hotel room and me repeating the numbers one through ten in Khmer, and, if I was feeling confident, the colors of the rainbow. Since he barely spoke English, he had to do things like tell the concierge to write a note asking me if I wanted him to shave and instructions to circle either 'yes' or 'no.'

At the end of the week I gave him my phone number, which he called regularly for about two months and then disappeared without explanation. Although I had enjoyed our fleeting romance, I wasn't particularly torn up about it. The whole thing had been so surreal, it was actually quite fitting that he just drifted out of my life like that.  — Annie