Serendipity

One of my sisters emailed me and told me about a Chinese Art appreciation seminar that was offered by one of the universities here, and being the web person that i am, I decided to look it up online. I started with Hong Kong University and noticed that instead of a Chinese painting appreciation class, there was a 3-day long workshop and seminar titled International Conference on Studies in Travel Writing. Fancy myself being a travel lover and dabble in writing ameuter travelogue to entertain nobody other than myself, plus the fact that I have never been to the HKU campus, I thought I'll drag Tunji to go check it out and perhaps learn some interesting points on travel writing.

WELL! It sure was interesting alright. It was all about travel writing, but only a couple of centuries off!!! Not all, but most of the "talks" were on analyzing and "studies" on travel writings that were written a few decades, if not centuries, before. It was interesting nonetheless, though the presentation was amusingly British and academic, and that echos all the way to its "multi media" presentation, which involved an old fashion over head projector with a transparency, that the presenter would have to stop in the middle of his/her speaking and skips over to either switch it on or to turn over a page that has a lot of words on it that nobody can read except perhaps people who sat in the very first row!

Here is a snippet of conversation that Tunji caught when we were sitting waiting for the keynote (Plenary as they call it here) speaker. Woman speaking with a clipped British accent," I'm writing a research paper (or did she say specialize??) on Francophone travel writings in Australia." The man relied, in an equally clipped British accent, "Oh, what period?"

Overall, it was quite an interesting event, it was just not exactly what we were expecting. We could at least relate to some of its language and content, but if it were about Mathematics or Nuclear Physics, we might have been completely lost and have walked out a long time ago.

I wonder what did they all think who we were or where did we come from, since they all seemed to know each other, and we certainly didn't look like we belong.