Saturday, February 9, 2008

Lunch with a Living Linguistics Legend...

Today Katherine and I had the pleasure of lunch with John Swales (who certainly will be known to some of the GK+HK readers). John is a man of many accomplishments in the field, to say the least, and though he is retired, he is still constantly contributing. In fact, we are very familiar with him because he is still very much affiliated with the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor. Amazing to see him here, no? He came to give five lectures at various Universities in Hong Kong (including Hong Kong U, where Katherine caught up with him) and help City U conduct some curriculum evaluations.


Here are the three of us at a fantastic Shanghainese restaurant (the third different Shanghainese place we visited this week ;>) in the Festival Walk shopping mall, very close to where he was staying at City U.

After lunch, as Katherine and I were parting from John, we happened across a giant peacock, terrorizing shoppers at the center of the mall...


At first, when it sighted me, I was in great peril...


...but after a nice heart-to-heart chat, we patched things up...


Much better.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

What a wonderful experience for both of you! It is always special to entertain a legend =)

I am thankful that you won over that peacock...sure would be sad to lose you...especially to an angry peacock

Carson said...

The peacock photos are hilarious! I love the woman on the upper level of the mall who seems to be either regarding your plight with sme consternation, or hoping that the peacock will eat you.

Glad you guys did get to meet up with John while he was in the area - I was wondering if you'd track each other down!

Unknown said...

Wow--John in HK! You must have had fun! He was in Colombo in 2006 for a conference and it was great to see him again--my all-time favourite academic!

Peacocks are a protected species in Africa--I suggest you be careful about harassing them even in HK :-)

 

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