Sandy's diary in Manchester (Feb, 2001)

Just click on any of the following underlined dates and you can get to know what's going on with me that day.

2nd Feb, 01 (Friday)

Reflections on the movies

I'm into the movie thing after finding out how cheap it is for students to watch a movie here.

Today, I watched 'What Women Want' & 'Pay It Forward'. Partly because of Helen Hunt, who starred in both movies. A question arose after I watched 'What Women Want': is getting to know what others are thinking about a pain or a pleasure? Maybe being an ordinary person is happier. The more you know, the less happier you may be.

So, now that there's a film called 'What Women Want', could there be:

'What Men Want?'

'What boys or girls want?'

'What my boss wants?'

'What I want?'

In fact, what do you want from my homepage?

'Pay it forward' obviously aims to make the audience burst into tears. What a good idea but kind of idealistic it is to show your gratitude for someone's help by helping the others!

The world would be much more peaceful and all the people would be happy ever after if everyone pays it forward!

7th Feb, 01 (Wed)

Homepages

In order to improve my present homepage that you're reading now, I attended a talk about free homepage learning. It was organised by a club called 'Webpage Design Society' or something like that. The public's interest in homepage design (and the Internet) was somehow revealed by the number of people (including me) who turned up for the talk, which just introduced us to what the training was about. Does this tell us that everyone wants to have a homepage of their own? I didn't take up the training finally or perhaps you may have seen a different version of my homepage. (but who knows?)

I've always been wondering if a homepage will become sort of an ID for everyone in future. Let's wait and see!

14th Feb, 01 (Wed)

St. Valentine's Day

I had an Indian dinner here for the first time. It's funny that the staff agreed to offer us free ice-creams in an attempt to persuade us to come into the restaurant, when we were looking at the menu outside. The food was alright. But if we can choose, Chinese dishes may still be our first choice.

15th Feb, 01 (Thur)

Eating; seminar

(1) I'm kind of a lazy person. Eating habit is a good example. At the very beginning since my arrival, I didn't mind spending half an hour every day to do the cooking for my dinner, as I got nothing to do in my room but studying. But since the exam period I changed my habit. I tried to minimize or save the cooking time by preparing some food for a few meals. For example, cook half a packet of spaghetti at one time for 2 to 3 meals (sometimes it's really too difficult to cook for yourself as you can't have many varieties and can't eat much food). I also bought the most convenient but healthy food like bread and eggs, which didn't take too much preparation and cooking time.

I sometimes even chose not to eat something which involved any complicated stuff. Like crabs. Today one of my flatmates asked me to try a bite of a small crab that she brought from Shanghai, where she had spent her Chinese New Year. I think crabs are very delicious and mouth-watering. Noodles with crabs in cheese sauce is one of my favourites. ^0^ But the scary appearance of that small crab stopped me having a try, seemingly saying, "Don't you dare to eat me?" when my nice flatmate took it out of a big jar with her chopsticks. More importantly, I turned down her sincere invitation because I didn't want to bother to make any efforts in breaking its shells just for a little sense of satisfaction. It's the same with other food like shelled shrimps.

(2) Do you think seminars are something serious, too academic? Yeah, maybe. But it isn't necessarily synonmous with the word 'boring'. Today I attended a talk organised by the Linguistics Society of my Department. The guest speaker was David Crystal, a name few of linguistics students would have never heard of. The topic was Language Endangerment & Language Death, which is what he writes about in one of his newly published books. I had sat in on the classes of the course about this hot topic last semester and I hadn't done much reading on it. But the talk and the way he presented his speech have driven me to read his book in detail.

17th Feb, 01 (Sat)

Studying abroad

It seems many parents in HK like to send their children abroad for a better study environment (as they claim) these days (because of the handicapped education system and ever-changing government policy on education). Those charts about the choice of destination can be found on the newspapers from time to time. UK, USA, Australia, Canada & New Zealand are familiar names. Not just children, those who have worked for a while also like to join the queue waiting for the flight to further their study.

I'm the second person among a group of close friends of mine who studied abroad after graduation/working for a while. Most recently one of our friends headed for Down Under (oz) to fulfil her dream.

Yan, congratulations & Best of luck to you, Enjoy your new life on the land of the other hemisphere!

Karina, best of luck & earn much more money for your study. You can make it! (Hopefully we'll be able to manage to see a game at Old Trafford together!!!)

18th Feb, 01 (Sun)

New flatmate

The flat that I'm living in is fully occupied now. We've got one more new flatmate today, who's from Poland. We just had another new flatmate, who's the only local person in our flat, move in the other day. While someone has moved in, another flatmate of mine still hasn't come back for almost a month. My flatmate wondered (and joked, I guess) whether she had been killed by her boyfriend!

25th Feb, 01 (Sun)

Soccer

An English football fans should know how special today was.

First, Manchester United thrashed Arsenal 6:1. (No, I'm not kidding) Second, Liverpool won the Worthington Cup on penalties over Birmingham City since 1995 after a 120-minute match at the Millennium Stadium of Cardiff in which Birmingham City equalised at the last minute.

Well, it's not a big deal, is it? But as a football fans, how can't I write something about these big news?

This is also a big day for BAFTA - a British movie awards, especially for the 14-year-old Jamie Bell who won the Best Actor for his role in 'Billy Elliot', but it's sad for his other contestants Tom Hanks, Russell Crowe & Michael Douglas!

26th Feb, 01 (Mon)

Credit card

What'd you do if the bank sent your new credit card to your home country while you're still abroad where you've applied for the card? Don't think it's impossible (everything in this world is possible) & ridiculous. At least it did happen to me, a poor girl. I had to get the thing sorted out in person today and I was told that they did it (sent the card to my HK's home) because my address here was not clear. But how come they supposed I'd get the card when I was still in England?

27th Feb, 01 (Tue)

Disasters

Can you believe - at the end of February, a time when Spring is supposed to have come, that it snowed? Maybe it shouldn't be surprising in the UK, where both natural (flooding) and man-made disasters (continuous rail accidents, BSE cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease) have happened. (but we were luckier than those in the East Coast of the US where snows have been heaped into a few inches!)

It's chilly and freezing these days. (but Uncle Sunny came back to us the next few days)

28th Feb, 01 (Wed)

Football again!

England beat Spain 3:0 in a friendly at Villa Park, which is important because it's a good start to the new era for the newly appointed England manager Sven Goran Eriksson. Of course, much was talked about in the media.

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