Day 6 - Fieldwork!
I have been exhausted so posts are going to be lagging by a day!! Things ramped up and got busy real fast but in a good way.
So yesterday, Deepam and I finally went to Mostec! Here’s us posing with a picture of a famous Slovenian linguist, Jože Toporišič, who actually laid the foundations for the research on nasal harmony we’re doing now. We had 3 participants lined up for the day, two in the morning and one after lunch. We left at 7:30 to drive there - it’s in the east of Slovenia and our first meeting was for 9am. Once we got to Mostec we met with Ilena who came with us to help with each participant. The people we saw had all done the experiment last year, so were fairly familiar with the process. We were going back to re-elicit some of the words that were missed last time, and with the first speaker we were testing out new nonce word-real word minimal pairs as well. Everyone was so welcoming and kind and easy to work with! I was a little nervous at first because I’ve never done anything like this before but I had nothing to worry about. It all went smoothly, the speakers were able to elicit the nasal glide we wanted them to, and we were served coffee at each house <3 I’ll try to take more pictures tomorrow but here’s us after finishing with the final participant, the man in blue. Fun fact, he was wearing the exact same shirt as he was during the recording last year, and Peter was also wearing a bright red shirt last year. Complete coincidence!
Midway through the day, after the second participant, the three of us went to a small town just across the Sava river, which we crossed on a tiny ferry. In this town there was an outdoor pool centre, with some slides and tubes and various types of pools!! Deepam can’t swim but Peter and I went for a few hours and had a great time. It had been ages since I’d been to such a place. We swam in the wave pool, both warm and cold pools, did a couple tubing slides that went way faster than I thought they would... All in all it was super refreshing and fun. Who ever thought I would be at a water park type thing with my prof? It was a pleasant break to the day! Totally worth the 15 minutes I had to spend putting on sunscreen.
After this we had crepes at Ilena’s house, made by her and her husband, with some homemade peach and plum jams. Everyone is so generous here and I’ve gotten the chance to try so much homemade food! Also, at a house nearby there were goats, sheep, and ponies so I got to see them!!! They were so cute and all came running to me, I was so happy. It truly made my day!
As fun and successful the day was, it was really nice to come home at the end of it. I did feel super satisfied though! I’m a real scientist now! Working in the field!!! Gathering actual data! Wow!! Can anyone believe it? I still can’t really.
We came back and rested for a bit before going with the others to get food. Peter stayed home to sleep but the kids went out on the town! Well, we walked to the city centre, played tourist, and found a restaurant. It’s so much fun traveling with other people! We had no shame in taking pictures of everything, of each other, even using Deepam’s selfie stick. It was a grand expedition and took us a while because we kept stopping for photos. Those are in a separate post because there’s too many to post here! We were all super happy to have a night out in the city after working hard and there was lots of laughter.
We ended up getting back home at like 11:30 after a long wander home, which was perhaps not the wisest move. We had to get up at 5:30 today!! Details as to why will be in the next post regarding today, but I really don’t have the energy to do that right now, seeing as we have to get up at 5:30 again tomorrow. I am so glad my first research experience is going so well! The people I’m working with are positive, Peter’s super supportive, and I’m having an amazing time. I wish I had the energy to write about what we did today on our day off! But, I guess that’s incentive to check back and read it later~
For now, bed. I need to be well rested to go to Carinthia tomorrow!!
