hello from Bristol

...well, here we are, in Bristol.

the plane flight over was long, but not terribly bad. my dad and i were able to get emergency-row seats, which meant a bit more legroom. we flew on an airbus (i think A300) that was pretty big, but not like a 747. each seat had its own video display, so you could watch whatever you wanted at any time.. pretty nice... i watched 'the bourne supremacy', which i liked a lot. i had a feeling that some good stuff (gratuitous violence) was edited out, but still made for a great flick. later on i re-watched 'the anchorman', which was great, even the second time around. the lady next to me was, er, generously proportioned, so i didn't have a lot of elbow room, but at least she didn't snore. the flight was quite bumpy, but not too bad (i guess the plane is too big to really get thrown about). i was surprised to see that we had a 120 mile tailwind. i guess the wind really gets going at 37,000 feet! our ground speed was something like 700 miles per hour... not shabby... and we arrived about 40 minutes early.

after the plane, we had a 3.5 hour bus ride to Bristol. the bus was quite a bit more comfortable than the plane, and we were practically the only people on it. then in Bristol we had to find which local bus to take... took us about 1.5 hours to actually get to the college. so overall a good 21 hours of travelling, from airport to college. by the time i went to sleep, i had been awake for almost 40 hours.

slept like a log last night! i think i slept for about 11 hours or so. in the morning i went to use my electric shaver, which i thought would work here because it said '~250' on it, which i thought meant 250 volts. i'd used a hair-dryer from home in the past, which worked just fine here. well, i plugged it into the adapter, then into the wall, turned it on, and it died in about 2 seconds... smelled burning plastic after that... i tossed it in the garbage can. i'm thinking it wasn't rated for 250 volts after all. went and bought a good ol razor this afternoon.

we had a 'continental' breakfast... cereal and toast. then i met with my advisor at around 11am. the meeting went well. he had read my thesis, which he said he enjoyed. he said it was 'well organized' and that i was a good writer (apparently a lot of people who do graduate work have to really improve their writing skills first). after those nice words he went on to tell me that while it was a good paper for what it was (a master's thesis), it was not to the level i'll need for a successful Ph.D. dissertation. he then went on to tell me why: basically i made too many implicit assumptions in the course of the work. in my dissertation i'll need to write for both a secular and religious audience, so have to be careful about that. he also said i pulled some ideas from sources without taking full consideration of their overall context. also that i too often assumed that the texts were transparent windows into history, without taking enough consideration of the author's motives... also that i need to figure out what kind of research i'm doing: history or biblical theology, or both... that i need to be careful that i have 'methodological clarity' when i pull from such a wide variety of sources. you can't pull something that takes a sociological approach then something from a historical approach and then something from a theological approch without making sure they form a coherent unity. also that i neglected the role of the cross & resurrection in my discussion of miracles... how does jesus' suffering and death impact my understanding of the miraculous.

all these were very good points, and i'm not surprised or discouraged that my thesis was a far cry from what my dissertation will need to be. i'd actually be a bit depressed if it wasn't, since i wouldn't have to learn much in that case. it also means that i can pretty much focus on the same topic for my dissertation, since nothing i wrote thus far can be taken over directly (you can't use the same work to fulfill two different degrees). i meet with nolland again tomorrow morning at 11, and hope to hammer out the direction of my work in the next year or so.

well, that's all for now... i'll write again soon.