Gaelicking

I'm on my lunch break after my first Gaelic class. I had such a big breakfast ("full" breakfast of bacon, sausage, hashbrown (not potato scone! :( ), tomato, mushrooms, beans, egg, toast, missing the black pudding too bad) that I don't think I'll be eating lunch. We get a morning and afternoon tea break as well so it seems all I've been doing is drinking tea. I can see where the Maritimes gets it from.

I guess I should say that the class went fine; a bit of a review for me in terms of vocabulary but working on my pronunciation and intonation so that's good. This afternoon we're going to learn to talk about the weather, which my teacher tells us is crucial for Gaelic conversations. Again, not so different from the Maritimes. If you can talk about the weather, where you're from and who you're related to, you're set.

There's a girl from Antigonish here (that's in Nova Scotia for my non-Maritime readers), one of the first Maritimers I've run into in a long while. We've already found one person that we know in common, of course. I'm sure there will be more if we keep trying.

People at the college here all know where PEI is. I guess if you're paying attention to Gaelic culture the name crops up, even though there's not many speakers there anymore.

I've caught myself pronouncing things a bit differently since I've gotten back into Scotland. I've been speaking a hybrid English for a while - sort of UK vocabulary with a Canadian accent. Recently I've caught myself saying "gair-age" instead of my usual "grage" (that's for "garage" as it's properly written) and "toe-maw-toe" intead of "ta-mah-tah" (i.e. "tomato"). I'm slipping.

I read in my Scotland guidebook that it's the only country in the world where neither Coke nor Pepsi is the favourite fizzy drink (pop). It's Irn-Bru (pronounced iron brew). Given the sort of "energy" nature of the drink (it has quinine in it, and I notice that it certainly perks me up more than something like Coke would), and it's popularlity amongst kids, it's amazing that I don't find Scottish children as annoying as English children, as they should be unnaturally awake all the time. Even when working in the Coylet restaurant, the majority of the Irn-Bru drinking children weren't too bad, and if they were, it was really their parents' fault for not controlling them.