Patois lesson and lights out

April 17, 2016 – This afternoon, after reaching a point where I needed to shun the sun, we looked at the activities board near the pool area. Volleyball, dancing, aquafit, soccer on the beach…..not interested in any of these. The one activity we’d both seen the other day that was of interest, but which we’d not ever managed to find underway, was Patois.

Patois is the local dialect and, particularly after listening to the conversations our bus driver and tour guide were having yesterday, we were interested in it. While we’d been on the drive home we’d caught snippets of their conversations – teenage pregnancy, drug use, sending their kids to University to learn and hopefully better themselves beyond their parent’s place in life. All the things every parent wants for their kids. Like I said, we caught snippets, it was English, with a twist, and we wanted to learn a little bit about the dialect.

This afternoon we asked where it was taking place and went there and waited. No one showed up. So we asked again and this time the woman at the towel booth said she’d call and find someone for us, so we went to a shady spot and waited. Sadly, it appears that the drinking games and pool party events are the things people are interested in being involved in, and the extent that the majority of tourists wish to go to learn about the people doesn’t go much father than learning “Ya mon” and “Respect”.

A short time later a beautiful young woman came over to us and introduced herself as Chocolate and asked about us and what we wanted to learn from her. So we got a private lesson in the history and evolution of the dialect and learned a few phrases. While she was explaining the history to us she asked if we had local dialects and we said yes, a little bit, except for one Province that no one could understand…she looked at us strangely for a few moments and then her face split into a huge smile and said “Newfoundlanders!”, apparently she’d encountered a few.

I missed the brief encounter completely, but Kirk overheard a man as he walked by…. as we were learning her ‘language’ the man said, loud enough for our teacher to hear, “I wish these people would learn to speak English properly!” Kirk said that Chocolate heard and her eyes snapped over to the man, and then back to Kirk, who gave her a pained expression. Here we were trying to understand her culture, and all this man wanted was for her to conform to his.

We learned from Chocolate for about a half hour before we couldn’t absorb any more. She even ran back to the office to get a pen and paper and wrote many of the phrases out for us.

We went and changed for dinner and went to walk near the beach to while away the hour or so we had before our dinner reservation. On the way down, just a few metres from exiting the elevator, the hotel went black. The upside to the blackout was that we hadn’t been in the elevator! A few minutes later and the lights and the pulsating music came back on and the parties continued. And hour or so later we went to drop something off at the room and noticed that the hillside above was empty of light. The blackout was still happening, the hotel was just running on generators so the guests could still have their music, their elevators (most of them), their internet, and their air conditioning.

As we were wandering the grounds Kirk commented on the lack of gekkos, and then suddenly we started to see them. Perhaps we’d just been looking for them too early, but there were lots, from big ones to tiny little babies barely half the length of my pinkie finger. One tiny one was zipping along the floor at the foot of a set of stairs and I bent down to try and usher it up the wall. I was afraid someone would step on it. All I probably managed to do was terrify the poor creature.

We went to our dinner reservation at the Japanese restaurant, a place where they cook in front of you, showman style, but before dinner could be served the heat of the day, the heat of the restaurant, and the heat from the huge grill in front of our table got to me and I felt ill. So I stopped the waitress from pouring Kirk’s glass of wine and said I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want her to waste the wine, and that we were very sorry but we would have to leave.

A bit of a lie down in the air conditioned room, for an hour or so, and I felt better, good enough to pop down to the buffet for a little bit of food and some ice water. A woman saw us come in and came over to inquire about how I was feeling and I realized that it was the same woman who’d been about to serve us next door. I guess her shift had ended and she was now helping to close up the buffet. She kindly let us make a quick plate and sit down to eat as they were cleaning up for the night.

Around us we can hear other visitors talking to each other about their lives, and it’s interesting….. And it made me think about the frustration we saw yesterday. It’s not that different anywhere you go. The tourists posture with other tourists and criticize the place they are visiting for being different from home. That is one side of tourism everywhere, but if you make the effort to step away from the partying, the dancing, the drinking, the parasailing, the booze cruises…..the touristy things…

If you speak to the people about their world, you learn a great deal more about your own.

It sounds like a bad end to the day, but it wasn’t, it was an interesting end. It was just more reflection on human behaviour.