Day 81: How time flies

Long time no post, but not many hugely important things going on anyway. On Thursday morning, Michele (one of our neighbours) went back the US, leaving her partner here to still be our neighbour. So on Wednesday night, we all went out for Sichuan food, then a nightcap as a goodbye thing.

When we first met Michele, I wasn't sure if I liked her, as she seemed to not like us very much. But the more we saw her, the more we realised she was actually just really shy, and was a really nice person. This realisation came a few weeks before she left. But at least we realised, and weren't celebrating her leaving.

On Friday night, we went out (not uncommon) to Fubar (福巴，公园北街), where we played Absolute Balderdash, had a few drinks and chatted away. Then a guy we know came over, Will, and he met Paul and Tobin, who he hadn't met before (he had met Tobin very very briefly outside a class, but that doesn't count). Within a matter of minutes, Will and Tobin were in the middle of a very heated argument about International Relations, and the world's view on Jewish people. We saw Will's true colours at this point, he was constantly, "We Jewish people think this" or "We Americans believe that" etc. He also refused to listen to anyone else's point of view, and if someone proved him wrong, he wouldn't accept it, and would just keep repeating his argument (which was invariable flawed). It gets worse.

Saturday, we went to Nolan's house, as he is organising a Speaker Series (getting people to talk about their specialist subjects because we don't know anything about it) and yesterday, Eric talked about Language Planning Policy in Xinjiang in the 30s and 40s, which was really interesting. I didn't understand everything, as it was a paper he wrote for his masters, and I'm not a linguist nor do I know huge amounts about Xinjiang in the 30s and 40s. But it was interesting, and I learned something. Afterwards, he said that comments and questions would be gratefully received. The questions I expected were things like, "Could you give me some background about this one thing? I'm still slightly unclear" or "So what was the role of this person in this area?" And from Tobin and Nolan, that's what the questions were (I felt too uneducated to ask questions, as did Nikki and Catherine). But from Will, he basically critiqued the presentation (saying it was waffly, unfocussed etc. And to be fair, had it been a proper presentation at a conference, he would have been 100% correct. But for sitting in someone's living room talking to your friends about something you know and they don't, I don't see the problem), then he mentioned certain sources that Eric should have used (at which point Eric butted in, saying he had read the sources and thought they were crap) and then started basically trying to be his tutor. The best line was: "I wrote a paper on this I think you should read."

So we don't like him. But Eric's presentation really did spark my interest - I never even knew that was a possible field of research (possibly because no one has actually done any work on the topic of his presentation except Eric). So I might do some more research into it myself (not like academic research, just finding out what more there is on the topic), and consider going down the linguistics route as opposed to T&I. But then, we were told by the head of our school that we should look for cohesion in our degrees, and I did a literature module and an extra language last year. But the literature module was basically a culture and society module, but with the information coming from novels, and the language one included history of the language, so I suppose if I did a culture or a linguistics module(s) next year, there is still cohesion. And it works with the linguistics and history (including political history) modules I did in first year. Huh, I think I'm on to something.