do i have covid, confusion and creole
The past day or two have been consumed by me worrying if i have COVID. The odds are that i don't, because most recent numbers only show a few thousand active cases in the entire country, and anyway my lifestyle is relatively safe... Or, at least, i think it is.
And that's really the whole thing, isn't it? Now that we have this "new" virus whose symptoms are almost exactly the same as the colds and flus we've been shrugging off our whole lives, every time a minor sniffle happens it's cause for concern.
In the past week i have suppressed about 3 sneezes and coughed inadvertently about 25 times. About two days ago i got a throatache. My chest has felt a little bit tight, although that might just be my imagination. I have definitely been feeling overheated and dehydrated, but it's not clear if that's just from living in a climate where it is very humid and above 30 degrees (85F) day and night. Also i moved back to a hotel, so my room is no longer on the 16th floor of a suburban building with wind gusting all around, but on the 5th floor in a busy, hot and sleazy part of town. I still walk 45 minutes to and from school every day, skipping taxis or public transport.
I can't figure how or where i could've gotten sick, but i am annoyed at whoever it was who gave it to me. It's true i eat at restaurants about once a day, but i only ever eat socially distanced at tables by myself. I don't have any friends or social contact outside of school, and on the streets i am masked all the time. I guess the most likely source is getting it through school, where i spend 4 hours unmasked (but still somewhat distanced) talking with my teachers. But none of them have been sick, that i'm aware of. I am inclined to blame the new Canadian expat who just showed up for classes, purely from his appearance, because he looks like some podcast listening, "antibody" having, hot take spouting douchenozzle. (In reality he's probably a perfectly nice guy, but i've decided to make him the villain in my story because he's another one of those foreigners i have been doing my best to avoid since i got to Panama.)
There has been an influx of foreigners since Christmas, especially in the expat-friendly area around the school. Guess everyone's trying to escape the shitstorm in Europe and North America, although ironically they're probably also the ones that will trigger it here. Ah well, such is la vida durante la pandemia.
The rest of my days have mostly been about school, and my struggle to learn Spanish.
I mean, it's not really a struggle. It's exhausting to study every day, to have to be "on" for classes. But i am making rapid progress. It turns out everything i learned back in those community college classes years ago didn't vanish, it just got trapped somewhere in the depths of my brain where i didn't use it, and refreshing the grammar and vocabulary was all i needed to get back to something around an A2 level.
But now i've hit the crossed wires moment, where words from different languages pop into my brain before the Spanish (or English) one does. I remember having this when i moved to Germany, and sometimes i'd find a Dutch word on my lips instead of the German one (which i also knew). Then it happened in China with German words and pronunciation getting in the way of my Chinese. And now i'm getting Chinese in the way of my Spanish. And German. And Dutch.
It really came to a head when i visited the El Dorado neighborhood, which is Panama City's "new" Chinatown (or suburban/middle-class Chinatown). I am pretty sure Cantonese is the most common language spoken there after Spanish, but i think there might be some Hakka and Hokkien too. Nobody speaks Mandarin, but just seeing all the Chinese products started my brain thinking in Chinese. And then i felt like an idiot because Mandarin popped out of my mouth instead of Spanish. Or in the middle of my Spanish i'd stumble on similar sounding words like yo (Spanish for "i") and yŏu (Mandarin for "to have"), or the Spanish "de" which is a preposition that means something like "of" and the Mandarin "de" which means something very similar but in exactly the opposite direction. In Spanish you say the thing "de" the person/place, but in Chinese you say the person/place "de" the thing, so i started talking back-to-front. And don't even get me started on the lack of question markers like "ma" in Spanish. How can anyone recognize a question without "ma"? You need it! Está bien what now?! Está bien ma? Estoy! Aaargh!
It really got me in a tangle at a bubble tea shop where i don't even know the words for most of the bubble tea things in English. Like, what's a 燒仙草? 五分糖? Burn hermit grass! Five piece sweet! Hundred smell fruit black dragon tea! Por favor! It was a total shitshow, because after the person at the counter tried to give me the English menu, then realized that i could speak Mandarin, she started speaking Mandarin to me. Relieved, i started trying to communicate in Chinese how it was that i could speak Chinese, but then i'd suddenly say "pero" in Spanish, or whatever other word, until i'm not entirely sure if anyone could understand anything of what i was saying any more. Just 頷首微笑, nod and smile.
It occurred to me that this might have been how creoles got started. When you all know bits of several different languages and then instead of everyone learning one language, you all make a total clusterfuck of the different languages and somehow everyone kinda figures out what certain phrases and structures mean and then stick to them.
I grew up a bit like this, mostly from my mother whose first language was Dutch, but who also knew enough German to be dangerous. Much like the Spanglish cliché of parents calling their kids "mis hijos", my mom would call us alternately "mijn kleintjes" or "meine kleine". And "verdomd" was a common replacement for "damned". I'm sure there were other phrases dotted about which i don't remember off-hand. After moving to Holland, we definitely started mixing up a lot more Dutch and English at home, or at least my mom and i did.
The thing is, when i turned up in Germany i didn't find myself around many people who munged their language as much as me, and definitely 100% in China not. Like, if i used two languages door mekaar [through each other] people would not understand either one, even if they spoke both. In fact i think the only people it happened with in the last 10 years is my Spanish friends in Berlin, who mangled their German, Spanish and English together like pros, and who understood me when i did the same.
On one hand i think it might have something to do with your level of fluency - maybe once you are very fluent you don't do it at all any more? - but it might also be something to do with how you learn languages, and how you store them in your brain. For me it just feels nicer to express myself in multiple languages sometimes, because some things sound more natural in one language or the other. It feels restrictive and annoying to force myself to only use one.
But... it's what must be done. I mean, even in Panama's Chinatown, most of the ethnic Chinese can't speak any Mandarin. It doesn't help if i 說中文 because they 講廣東話... Or, more to the point, they hablan español, because they were born in fucking Panama.
And that's what inspired my answer when a couple of students started a conversation with me in the bubble tea shop. "What do you like best about Panama?" Well, that's a tough question because i think the food is pretty bland, there isn't much scenery that's easy to access from inside the city, and for the past couple weeks i've just been at school anyway, so what the fuck am i supposed to say?
I ended up saying i liked the diversity of the country, which is true. Like a fucking gringo, i guess i kinda assumed that everywhere "south of the border" would just be one kind of generically Roman Catholic mestizo culture, but that's not the case at all. There are people with African heritage, Middle Eastern, European, Asian, indigenous American, and every combination of those... Different religions, different values, different political opinions... Maybe living in China kinda warped my view of other countries, after being on the receiving end of a million vapid declarations of the form "China people are like X, foreign people are like Y". Panama is far more diverse than that, and not just in the sense of people with many different hair and skin colors all living and working side by side. It's how society is organized too. There isn't like one special section of the shop for black people's hair products, or an aisle for "exotic" spices that is different to the aisle with the white people spices. Everything is all mixed up together. Like a creole. You don't really realize how segregated places like the US and Canada still are until you walk around a bit in a place like Panama. But that's hard to explain to a Panamanian.
Of course when they heard i had been to China i got asked "so do you like anime? do you like K-pop?" because i guess in the eyes of these kids who made a special trip across town to visit a bubble tea shop all the East Asian cultural artifacts blend into one, so that made me feel a bit less like an ignorant gringo. I do think i disappointed them a bit, though, by not being more into the amorphous East Asian entertainment scene.
I didn't share with them that i think i have been suffering from Stockholm syndrome, because after 2-3 weeks in their country i secretly started enjoying their local típico music. Especially when the men stop singing about their broken hearts and it transitions to the climax full of frantic accordioning and incomprehensible yodeling.
Me Marcharé - Nenito Vargas & Los Plumas Negras
I'm sure young, hip, K-pop listening students would be appalled that i have somehow ended up liking the most folksy, country-ass dad music that there is in the country. But i can't help it. It's played almost everywhere. Very fucking loud.
I got a Christmas present.
If you thought to yourself "oh, hot tamale", you're wrong. This is a Venezuelan goodie known as an hallaca, which admittedly is an awful lot like a tamale.
It's got more stuff in it, though. Like... Raisins and olives? I think? And different meats? It was really delicious, even nibbling it cold in my hotel room. Unfortunately i got maybe-COVID immediately after that, so my mind got distracted and i didn't enjoy the memory of it as much as i should've. Glad i took a photo.
Yesterday i tried to distract myself from the distraction by watching the first five episodes of Foundation, which is an epic science fiction yarn by Isaac Asimov that i remember some of my friends reading when i was in school, but i never got around to borrowing from the library. It's a bit more fantasy-ish than the cyberpunky near future sci-fi i really enjoy, but after getting through a few episodes it's started feeling pleasantly Dune-ish, so i can recommend it.
I got one more day of school and then i have a New Year's Eve date with my friend R where i will drink warm beer in my hotel room and we will Skype while the rest of the world spreads their COVID all over the place and blows shit up. Hopefully my maybe-COVID will be gone by then because it's annoying being sick, even just very mildly.
Time to make dinner, a tortilla with some mashed nana, dates, 山楂, 辣條 and peanuts. Embracing the creole.
And that's really the whole thing, isn't it? Now that we have this "new" virus whose symptoms are almost exactly the same as the colds and flus we've been shrugging off our whole lives, every time a minor sniffle happens it's cause for concern.
In the past week i have suppressed about 3 sneezes and coughed inadvertently about 25 times. About two days ago i got a throatache. My chest has felt a little bit tight, although that might just be my imagination. I have definitely been feeling overheated and dehydrated, but it's not clear if that's just from living in a climate where it is very humid and above 30 degrees (85F) day and night. Also i moved back to a hotel, so my room is no longer on the 16th floor of a suburban building with wind gusting all around, but on the 5th floor in a busy, hot and sleazy part of town. I still walk 45 minutes to and from school every day, skipping taxis or public transport.
I can't figure how or where i could've gotten sick, but i am annoyed at whoever it was who gave it to me. It's true i eat at restaurants about once a day, but i only ever eat socially distanced at tables by myself. I don't have any friends or social contact outside of school, and on the streets i am masked all the time. I guess the most likely source is getting it through school, where i spend 4 hours unmasked (but still somewhat distanced) talking with my teachers. But none of them have been sick, that i'm aware of. I am inclined to blame the new Canadian expat who just showed up for classes, purely from his appearance, because he looks like some podcast listening, "antibody" having, hot take spouting douchenozzle. (In reality he's probably a perfectly nice guy, but i've decided to make him the villain in my story because he's another one of those foreigners i have been doing my best to avoid since i got to Panama.)
There has been an influx of foreigners since Christmas, especially in the expat-friendly area around the school. Guess everyone's trying to escape the shitstorm in Europe and North America, although ironically they're probably also the ones that will trigger it here. Ah well, such is la vida durante la pandemia.
The rest of my days have mostly been about school, and my struggle to learn Spanish.
I mean, it's not really a struggle. It's exhausting to study every day, to have to be "on" for classes. But i am making rapid progress. It turns out everything i learned back in those community college classes years ago didn't vanish, it just got trapped somewhere in the depths of my brain where i didn't use it, and refreshing the grammar and vocabulary was all i needed to get back to something around an A2 level.
But now i've hit the crossed wires moment, where words from different languages pop into my brain before the Spanish (or English) one does. I remember having this when i moved to Germany, and sometimes i'd find a Dutch word on my lips instead of the German one (which i also knew). Then it happened in China with German words and pronunciation getting in the way of my Chinese. And now i'm getting Chinese in the way of my Spanish. And German. And Dutch.
It really came to a head when i visited the El Dorado neighborhood, which is Panama City's "new" Chinatown (or suburban/middle-class Chinatown). I am pretty sure Cantonese is the most common language spoken there after Spanish, but i think there might be some Hakka and Hokkien too. Nobody speaks Mandarin, but just seeing all the Chinese products started my brain thinking in Chinese. And then i felt like an idiot because Mandarin popped out of my mouth instead of Spanish. Or in the middle of my Spanish i'd stumble on similar sounding words like yo (Spanish for "i") and yŏu (Mandarin for "to have"), or the Spanish "de" which is a preposition that means something like "of" and the Mandarin "de" which means something very similar but in exactly the opposite direction. In Spanish you say the thing "de" the person/place, but in Chinese you say the person/place "de" the thing, so i started talking back-to-front. And don't even get me started on the lack of question markers like "ma" in Spanish. How can anyone recognize a question without "ma"? You need it! Está bien what now?! Está bien ma? Estoy! Aaargh!
It really got me in a tangle at a bubble tea shop where i don't even know the words for most of the bubble tea things in English. Like, what's a 燒仙草? 五分糖? Burn hermit grass! Five piece sweet! Hundred smell fruit black dragon tea! Por favor! It was a total shitshow, because after the person at the counter tried to give me the English menu, then realized that i could speak Mandarin, she started speaking Mandarin to me. Relieved, i started trying to communicate in Chinese how it was that i could speak Chinese, but then i'd suddenly say "pero" in Spanish, or whatever other word, until i'm not entirely sure if anyone could understand anything of what i was saying any more. Just 頷首微笑, nod and smile.
It occurred to me that this might have been how creoles got started. When you all know bits of several different languages and then instead of everyone learning one language, you all make a total clusterfuck of the different languages and somehow everyone kinda figures out what certain phrases and structures mean and then stick to them.
I grew up a bit like this, mostly from my mother whose first language was Dutch, but who also knew enough German to be dangerous. Much like the Spanglish cliché of parents calling their kids "mis hijos", my mom would call us alternately "mijn kleintjes" or "meine kleine". And "verdomd" was a common replacement for "damned". I'm sure there were other phrases dotted about which i don't remember off-hand. After moving to Holland, we definitely started mixing up a lot more Dutch and English at home, or at least my mom and i did.
The thing is, when i turned up in Germany i didn't find myself around many people who munged their language as much as me, and definitely 100% in China not. Like, if i used two languages door mekaar [through each other] people would not understand either one, even if they spoke both. In fact i think the only people it happened with in the last 10 years is my Spanish friends in Berlin, who mangled their German, Spanish and English together like pros, and who understood me when i did the same.
On one hand i think it might have something to do with your level of fluency - maybe once you are very fluent you don't do it at all any more? - but it might also be something to do with how you learn languages, and how you store them in your brain. For me it just feels nicer to express myself in multiple languages sometimes, because some things sound more natural in one language or the other. It feels restrictive and annoying to force myself to only use one.
But... it's what must be done. I mean, even in Panama's Chinatown, most of the ethnic Chinese can't speak any Mandarin. It doesn't help if i 說中文 because they 講廣東話... Or, more to the point, they hablan español, because they were born in fucking Panama.
And that's what inspired my answer when a couple of students started a conversation with me in the bubble tea shop. "What do you like best about Panama?" Well, that's a tough question because i think the food is pretty bland, there isn't much scenery that's easy to access from inside the city, and for the past couple weeks i've just been at school anyway, so what the fuck am i supposed to say?
I ended up saying i liked the diversity of the country, which is true. Like a fucking gringo, i guess i kinda assumed that everywhere "south of the border" would just be one kind of generically Roman Catholic mestizo culture, but that's not the case at all. There are people with African heritage, Middle Eastern, European, Asian, indigenous American, and every combination of those... Different religions, different values, different political opinions... Maybe living in China kinda warped my view of other countries, after being on the receiving end of a million vapid declarations of the form "China people are like X, foreign people are like Y". Panama is far more diverse than that, and not just in the sense of people with many different hair and skin colors all living and working side by side. It's how society is organized too. There isn't like one special section of the shop for black people's hair products, or an aisle for "exotic" spices that is different to the aisle with the white people spices. Everything is all mixed up together. Like a creole. You don't really realize how segregated places like the US and Canada still are until you walk around a bit in a place like Panama. But that's hard to explain to a Panamanian.
Of course when they heard i had been to China i got asked "so do you like anime? do you like K-pop?" because i guess in the eyes of these kids who made a special trip across town to visit a bubble tea shop all the East Asian cultural artifacts blend into one, so that made me feel a bit less like an ignorant gringo. I do think i disappointed them a bit, though, by not being more into the amorphous East Asian entertainment scene.
I didn't share with them that i think i have been suffering from Stockholm syndrome, because after 2-3 weeks in their country i secretly started enjoying their local típico music. Especially when the men stop singing about their broken hearts and it transitions to the climax full of frantic accordioning and incomprehensible yodeling.
Click to viewMe Marcharé - Nenito Vargas & Los Plumas Negras
I'm sure young, hip, K-pop listening students would be appalled that i have somehow ended up liking the most folksy, country-ass dad music that there is in the country. But i can't help it. It's played almost everywhere. Very fucking loud.
I got a Christmas present.
If you thought to yourself "oh, hot tamale", you're wrong. This is a Venezuelan goodie known as an hallaca, which admittedly is an awful lot like a tamale.
It's got more stuff in it, though. Like... Raisins and olives? I think? And different meats? It was really delicious, even nibbling it cold in my hotel room. Unfortunately i got maybe-COVID immediately after that, so my mind got distracted and i didn't enjoy the memory of it as much as i should've. Glad i took a photo.
Yesterday i tried to distract myself from the distraction by watching the first five episodes of Foundation, which is an epic science fiction yarn by Isaac Asimov that i remember some of my friends reading when i was in school, but i never got around to borrowing from the library. It's a bit more fantasy-ish than the cyberpunky near future sci-fi i really enjoy, but after getting through a few episodes it's started feeling pleasantly Dune-ish, so i can recommend it.
I got one more day of school and then i have a New Year's Eve date with my friend R where i will drink warm beer in my hotel room and we will Skype while the rest of the world spreads their COVID all over the place and blows shit up. Hopefully my maybe-COVID will be gone by then because it's annoying being sick, even just very mildly.
Time to make dinner, a tortilla with some mashed nana, dates, 山楂, 辣條 and peanuts. Embracing the creole.