70%

For those of you who don't know, I teach English at the National University of Laos in Vientiane. My students are college students, some older than me, but often I feel like I am teaching high schoolers. This story is a short illustration of that.

Scene: Right after dismissing my Friday afternoon phonetics class I see a male and a female student who always seem to sit together walk away. In Laos it is terribly impolite for boys and girls to touch each other at all, but this creative couple had managed to get around that loophole. They were each carrying the end of a closed umbrella and swinging it between them. I turned to the students still hanging around the classroom.

Me (in Lao): Are those two dating?

Student A: No Teacher, they're just best friends.

(All the other students laugh)

Student B: They're almost a couple teacher...probably 70% now.

Maybe its just me, but I thought it was hilliarious that someone would use a percentage to classify this relationship. And I wonder how they chose 70%, does that mean you can sit next to each other at lunch but you still go on group dates? What does a 50% couple look like?

I'm planning on asking in another week if they're up to 80% yet.