All kinds of awesome

Today I had my meeting with my Creole teacher (who, incidentally, appears to be only a little older than my dad, but is already a great-grandfather!). It started off great, as he gave me a copy of a dissertation that I had previously borrowed through interlibrary loan, but hadn't been able to finish scanning. So now I have it to keep.

We then went to his house, where he turned on the Tour de France in the background. Anyhow, we had a fairly productive session in which I found out all sorts of things that have never been documented in the language, like you can ask a question that translates as 'Who and Mary went to the store?' (and other things that I'll put in a later post). And then he took me to meet his friend, and I ended up meeting the whole Creole-speaking family.

In addition to being a good day for research (which by that point it already had been), at this point it was a good day for conversation. I hadn't really been conversing much in Creole at this point. The elicitation sessions were conducted in French, mainly doing translations, identifications, etc., but when I was with the teacher and his friend (the two main people I spoke to), we spoke in Creole,
and despite a few errors (mainly inserting Haitianisms), they said I spoke better Creole than some people raised here. So I took it to be indicative of several things:

1) I'm all kinds of awesome.

2) I'm learning to compartmentalize the two creoles better than when I arrived. Most speakers of the local creole are exposed to a variety of different creoles, such that many don't even realize when a form is not historically a part of the local creole, but is in fact a recent borrowing from Haitian, Antillean, etc. They learn their language naturally, and generally don't study it in school. I, on the other hand, learned the differences from books, so even when I mix, I realize soon after that I mixed them up and I know how to correct myself.


So with the best compliment I've received since I got here, I decided to treat myself to McDonald's. I'd been having major cravings for that and for crêpes since I got here, so I finally gave in. I wanted to see if they customized it to the region (following Brazil or Surinam), or if they followed France. Answer: France. Disappointing.

Now I'll go spend the rest of the day wandering and reading, in preparation for tomorrow's national holiday, Bastille Day.