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8 Jun 2013 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stockingsandseams My River Song t-shirt was a real hit on the metro today :) A gorgeous little Spanish boy (at least, he was speaking Spanish to his dad; his grandmother was speaking to him in French) recognised her & the TARDIS and instantly decided we were best friends. When he realised I spoke Spanish, he switched to telling me all about his favourite River episodes and showing me a 'magic trick' kind of thing in Spanish instead of French. And then another kid, maybe about 9 years old (the Spanish boy can't have been older than 4 or 5), pricked up his ears at the Spanish and said he was learning that in school, and became his new best friend for the last few stops.
I've never really wondered if there was a big Doctor Who fandom in non-Anglophone countries, and I don't know if his mum or dad were just fans who introduced him to the show, but it was a really cute moment. Out of all the things I'm going to miss about living here, the public transport and the people on said transport rank pretty highly - it's nice not to feel as though you're breaking the law by making eye contact with your other passengers, although I'm sure I come off as very stereotypically British anyway. :D
Apart from that, it's mostly been a case of trying to pack my things and get ready to return home. I still have to sort out a bit of a tangle with my ECTs, which has me nervous (and as the whole Erasmus money situation depends on that working out, my dad's getting nervous, too, and mum has temporarily banned him from Skyping with me), and then pay off the final rent, get my security deposit back, and then home to the UK on Saturday.
My dissertation's due in on October and I'm trying to retroactively plan it out because my tutor wants to see my process - unfortunately for me, my 'process' is largely "write down every idea you have, turn them into paragraphs, continue re-writing until something vaguely coherent comes out the other end", and she's one of the tutors who believes in expanding plans and improving them before writing a first draft and making slight tweaks. Bit of a difference in style, but I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to work with her - she's just so incredibly smart, and eloquent, and she uses words I have to look up in the dictionary before I understand she's complimenting me, and I think I'm a tiny bit in love with her brain. I just want her to explain all the things to me, forever.
The plan for this weekend was to go to the beach/Barcelona (there's a sign outside my apartment pointing to the main road reading "BARCELONE 2 HRS" which has taunted me all year!) but the rain put the kibosh on the beach plan, so we'll see if I can rouse some other non-locals to come with me to Spain tomorrow. Fingers crossed, otherwise it'll be another productive afternoon in my apartment, trying to defrost my fridge.
I realised the other day that I already posted my mouse back to the UK, which is making it even harder to navigate Marathon corridors. I can't get the hang of it with my laptop touchpad. Poor security officer, you're never going to make it out alive at this rate. Of course this might be what your incorporeal boyfriend has wanted all along, and when I say "might", I mean "dammit, Durandal!". :D But Marathon's high on my list of 'media I want to finish this summer'.
I've been reading a lot of Les Futurs Mystères de Paris; they're detective novels set in Paris in the 2060s, with a lot of noir elements mixed in with the sci-fi tech and preoccupation with mutants. If I remember, these'll be high on my list of Yuletide nominations this year - I just want someone to squee with me about Tem and Eileen, and all of the gorgeous worldbuilding and the Pratchett-esque voice... Alas, there's no real fandom I can find, in English or in French. I think the first book came out some time in the mid 90s so it might be a little dated but the SF club I joined at the university here was mostly interested in talking about Asimov, Star Wars and Star Trek so it might just not attract fans as much as the space opera style novels do. With the exception of Sherlock Holmes, of course, I can't think of many big fandoms for detective novels - the procedural shows tend to attract a fair-sized fandom (CSI, for example, or Criminal Minds; not sure if I'd count Hannibal amongst this yet - the show has a lot of elements of the standard procedural if you consider Will to be the protagonist, but if you consider Hannibal to be the protagonist then I think that changes the genre considerably) but less so books, and I'm not convinced it's solely because books tend to equal smaller fandoms anyway. (As a general rule - of course Harry Potter and the Hunger Games are big exceptions, but ime most book fandoms are quite small).
Other things on my reading list are Histoires de la Révolution et de l'Empire, Mal de femme : la perversion au féminin and Un amour d’escargot. They're getting to be more and more of a worry, as I'll soon be leaving this library behind for good, but at least I'm not depending on them for any work over the summer. In terms of telly, I'm almost all caught up with Hannibal, saving Warehouse 13 for when I get back to the UK, and I've been rewatching a lot of Mystery Incorporated, which is easily my favourite Scooby Doo adaptation. I, uh, might have suddenly remembered how intensely I shipped Velma/Marcie all in a rush, and now I'm quietly tortured by the fact there's practically no fic for the whole canon, let alone those two. :(
I've never really wondered if there was a big Doctor Who fandom in non-Anglophone countries, and I don't know if his mum or dad were just fans who introduced him to the show, but it was a really cute moment. Out of all the things I'm going to miss about living here, the public transport and the people on said transport rank pretty highly - it's nice not to feel as though you're breaking the law by making eye contact with your other passengers, although I'm sure I come off as very stereotypically British anyway. :D
Apart from that, it's mostly been a case of trying to pack my things and get ready to return home. I still have to sort out a bit of a tangle with my ECTs, which has me nervous (and as the whole Erasmus money situation depends on that working out, my dad's getting nervous, too, and mum has temporarily banned him from Skyping with me), and then pay off the final rent, get my security deposit back, and then home to the UK on Saturday.
My dissertation's due in on October and I'm trying to retroactively plan it out because my tutor wants to see my process - unfortunately for me, my 'process' is largely "write down every idea you have, turn them into paragraphs, continue re-writing until something vaguely coherent comes out the other end", and she's one of the tutors who believes in expanding plans and improving them before writing a first draft and making slight tweaks. Bit of a difference in style, but I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to work with her - she's just so incredibly smart, and eloquent, and she uses words I have to look up in the dictionary before I understand she's complimenting me, and I think I'm a tiny bit in love with her brain. I just want her to explain all the things to me, forever.
The plan for this weekend was to go to the beach/Barcelona (there's a sign outside my apartment pointing to the main road reading "BARCELONE 2 HRS" which has taunted me all year!) but the rain put the kibosh on the beach plan, so we'll see if I can rouse some other non-locals to come with me to Spain tomorrow. Fingers crossed, otherwise it'll be another productive afternoon in my apartment, trying to defrost my fridge.
I realised the other day that I already posted my mouse back to the UK, which is making it even harder to navigate Marathon corridors. I can't get the hang of it with my laptop touchpad. Poor security officer, you're never going to make it out alive at this rate. Of course this might be what your incorporeal boyfriend has wanted all along, and when I say "might", I mean "dammit, Durandal!". :D But Marathon's high on my list of 'media I want to finish this summer'.
I've been reading a lot of Les Futurs Mystères de Paris; they're detective novels set in Paris in the 2060s, with a lot of noir elements mixed in with the sci-fi tech and preoccupation with mutants. If I remember, these'll be high on my list of Yuletide nominations this year - I just want someone to squee with me about Tem and Eileen, and all of the gorgeous worldbuilding and the Pratchett-esque voice... Alas, there's no real fandom I can find, in English or in French. I think the first book came out some time in the mid 90s so it might be a little dated but the SF club I joined at the university here was mostly interested in talking about Asimov, Star Wars and Star Trek so it might just not attract fans as much as the space opera style novels do. With the exception of Sherlock Holmes, of course, I can't think of many big fandoms for detective novels - the procedural shows tend to attract a fair-sized fandom (CSI, for example, or Criminal Minds; not sure if I'd count Hannibal amongst this yet - the show has a lot of elements of the standard procedural if you consider Will to be the protagonist, but if you consider Hannibal to be the protagonist then I think that changes the genre considerably) but less so books, and I'm not convinced it's solely because books tend to equal smaller fandoms anyway. (As a general rule - of course Harry Potter and the Hunger Games are big exceptions, but ime most book fandoms are quite small).
Other things on my reading list are Histoires de la Révolution et de l'Empire, Mal de femme : la perversion au féminin and Un amour d’escargot. They're getting to be more and more of a worry, as I'll soon be leaving this library behind for good, but at least I'm not depending on them for any work over the summer. In terms of telly, I'm almost all caught up with Hannibal, saving Warehouse 13 for when I get back to the UK, and I've been rewatching a lot of Mystery Incorporated, which is easily my favourite Scooby Doo adaptation. I, uh, might have suddenly remembered how intensely I shipped Velma/Marcie all in a rush, and now I'm quietly tortured by the fact there's practically no fic for the whole canon, let alone those two. :(
