Languages, Photography → Pidgin Rain
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Two days of sustained torrential rain followed a long week of scorching hot temperatures.
Well, that’s summer in Xi’an. One day, very hot and humid, and the other day, refreshing torrential rain.
I’ve had this project in mind for a long time already… to take pictures while holding an umbrella, which gives the viewer a feeling of being inside the photo, under the rain, breathing the cold, damp air.
Getting off an overhead bridge.
My two year studies in China are now finally over. I will report on this later, when I am back in Montreal. One of the things I will miss most from my life in China is the diversity of people I met here. They were Brazilians, Russians, Ecuadorians, Italians, French, Americans, Australians, Canadians and, obviously, Chinese.
One of the most interesting phenomena that I experienced here was with the Latin students, those whose language belongs to the Latin languages family (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese). We could manage to understand each other by using some sort of bastardized form of Spanish, more or less so, depending on the Spanish level of the speaker. Each one would speak Spanish, adding some words from their own native language into it. For instance, Daniele, an Italian, would always say “troppo” (too much) and “ancora” (again; still) instead of the proper Spanish words “demasiado” and “todavía“. But for a French speaker as myself, I could easily pick up those words as they sounded and looked like their French counterparts (“trop” and “encore“). Besides, when talking to him I would use the French word “demain” (tomorrow) instead of Spanish “mañana“, because it sounded more like the Italian “domani“. While the Brazilians would use a more correct Spanish, they would still make some substitutions, for example, the articles “el” and “la” (the) would often be rendered “o” and “a“, as in Portuguese. Sometimes we would even directly speak in our mother tongues and understand each other. (But unfortunately, even if French words look the same as other Latin words when written, they are pronounced so differently that it made French the most difficult language to understand in our group). We made our own pidgin, that is a simple dialect; the first step towards creole. I think that if we were all lost on a remote island, our pidgin would become, after a few years or generations, a full fledged language!
