On Monday (22 Sep.) I went to a dinner hosted by the college chapel, which is a Christian church on campus. On the way there I met a girl from Austria, named Maria, and she was also looking for the exact place to go so we went together. That place wasn’t hard to find with volunteers outside telling which way to go. The dinner was good, especially for someone like me who hadn’t yet cooked any hot food after arrival. I got the vegetarian one, delicious, especially the lasagna covered with a thick layer of cheese, really yummy. I had a plateful of food, without saving space for dessert. After that, since the dinner was hosted by the church, certainly we got some information thereof. But that wasn’t bad, either. Those people from the church were really nice, and you could see from their speech and action that they were really happy to help. They also arranged a tour around Aberdeen on the coming Saturday, which both Maria and I paid the £3 to join. We also met a boy from Germany, a girl from Poland, and another boy from Nigeria. All these people were friendly and they were all Christians. It seems that I was the only atheist in this group, while the German boy also added that he didn’t believe everything of the Bible. And Maria, who's a Catholic, said that the Bible shouldn’t be understood literally, and some sentences were actually telling metaphors instead of their literal meanings. This would make the book more sensible I guess, only that I still didn’t have any idea about the content. Think maybe I should read it through after all, plus that I happened to have one on my book-shelf. Don’t know whether someone left it there, or the accommodation just provided us with bibles. Anyway, it should be worth reading.
A good dinner. And a good opportunity to talk to different people and make friends. Right. One thing I slightly felt annoyed but not upset about, was that the priest in the white gown said something like: since everybody was here in Scotland, it was better that everyone spoke English rather than his or her mother language, coz it would be a great opportunity to learn English. And he gave examples of Cantonese and Mandarin, which was clearly referring to Chinese people. Well, I didn’t mean that it mattered at all to hear that, but I just couldn’t help feeling slightly anooyed hearing this. Should there be a problem to speak the first language when people from the same place were together? Maybe because the looks and way of Chinese people were kind of unique that they were easily identified, which made other people more aware of them than of people from elsewhere. Or maybe there were other reasons that I’m still unaware of. Well, I’ll see. Anyway, a nice evening overall.
