Movies and More

I am currently in Dublin, Ireland and will be so until the 24th of January. I will be posting on my experiences here soon, but I currently wanted to do something else. During my time here in the UK and on breaks, I have taken to seeing movies and becoming a movie buff. I thought I'd share my review on three films that I have seen recently.

American History X - A story about a skinhead. After years of being in a gang and believing he was helping the United States, the character ends up murdering two people in a quick act of hate. The story is about his time after serving three years in jail (he only got charged for manslaughter), and how his view of the world and what he did has changed. It follows the skinhead's brother who believes he has been doing exactly what his brother would have wanted of him.

13/15


Valentine's Day - i remember the day Love Actually and He's Just Not That Into You both became two films I enjoyed. I thought they both portrayed love in funny ways, but both told good stories and were well directed. I recently saw Valentine's Day. I can say that this is a terrible movie, with bad acting, but still manages to have a few scenes of entertainment. It has a star cast, just as the two previous, but just fails with its jokes and romance. I hear New Year's Eve is the like movie to the ones listed here, but i here its worse.

3/15

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - I read the book a few years ago. I remember taking to the book because of the innocence of the child and how the author wrote through his perspective. The movie does a very good job of realizing the book into a visual production. It also portrays Nazi Germany in a realistic way. People are living their daily lives as normally as they can and the sun is shining. The sky isn't always gray.

11/15

More reviews to come as I watch more :)

Inter-semester Break: Dublin, Ireland

Unlike my previous blog posts regarding my vacations I wanted to keep this one short and sweet because the trip I took was both of these. Unfortunately I did not take any photos, but the photos my friends took are on Facebook.

I went to Dublin with two friends of mine from St Andrews' Jewish Society. I spent a total of five days with them.

Our days were very relaxed and full of a number of pubs. We averaged around three a day. This isn't to say we drank from morning till evening, rather, we enjoyed the diverse pub atmosphere Dublin provides. Each pub we went to had its own unique feeling and its own claim to fame. Some of the famous ones we went to were Whelan's, where P.S. I Love You was filmed, O'Donoghue's, where the band The Dubliners formed, Against the Grain, a bar famous for its imported beer, and The Temple Bar, a location key to Dublin's history.

We visited the Book of Kells, the National Archaeology Museum of Ireland, and St Patrick's Cathedral, where Jonathan Swift resides.

We ate excellent restaurants and pubs. Had amazing food, but our favorite was salmon with crust along with perfectly spiced mash and spinach. We also indulged in tasty quesadillas and home made falafel and Guinness treacle bread.

One day we spent the morning in the Guinness Storehouse. We toured through the historic and current location of Ireland's, and maybe the world's, number one draught. We finished the tour with a Guinness each in the Gravity Bar, a bar with nearly a full view of the area of Dublin.

The best day I had was when we went on a guided tour along the coast of Dublin and to the Wicklow Mountains. We saw where the films such as P.S. I Love You and Braveheart were filmed. We saw the house where the Guinness family resides. And, we saw Glendalough, where a very old monestary resided under St. Kevin.


Overall, my trip to Ireland was perfect. Ireland was perfect. It's green and friendly. The accent is excellent, my favorite of all time.


I'll end with a quick song made about Guinness that I found in a pub:

"Sing a song of Guinness,
A bottle full of good,
Since it is for goodness,
Guinness always stood.
When the bottle's opened
We all began to shout,
'There's nothing like a Guinness
When you feel-tired-out'.

Winter Vacay Part 4 - Geneva

December 30^th – Geneva Day 1

We began the day with an early train to Geneva. Weather decided to resist us. Forty minutes outside of Geneva branches had fallen on the wires the train uses. We were stuck. Four to five hours later the technicians and crew men had cleared the wire and another train was brought along to help us get to Geneva. We had lost half a day but weren’t too upset. We hadn’t planned what to see in Geneva. None of us really knew anything about the city.

When we arrived my friend, a resident of Geneva that goes to school with me in St Andrews, picked us up and took us to her house. We illegally took both tram and bus, but discovered that public transportation in Geneva isn’t anything to brag about. A tram and bus traffic jam occurred outside a main shopping center. Geneva had just redone their system. I think it needs redoing again.

We spent the rest of the day relaxing, making mince pies and eating. Come evening, my brother’s friend and I joined my friend for a local’s party. There we enjoyed a night of beer, live music (violin, piano, guitar, and more) and conversation. English was a commonly spoken language, though few there spoke it very well. To my surprise, I ended up speaking Hebrew with a number of people. A lot of present people were Jewish, and one had just spent three months in Israel.

The live music continued for hours until the players put down their instruments and a computer with speakers were set up. People started dancing and jumping round.

An hour or two later I was back at my friend’s. I was tired.

31^st December – Geneva Day 2

I slept wonderfully!

I didn’t wake up for quite some time, but my brother woke me. When he did I hopped into the shower, the first time in a couple of days. It felt great and relaxing.

My friend and my brother’s did not wake up yet. When they did, we all came together in the kitchen and had breakfast very, very slowly. Finally, my friend decided it was time to go and we headed into town.

Walking there we stopped by a few of Geneva’s historical and monumental places. We saw its fountain that sat just beyond the docks, visible from all over Geneva. We picked up my friend’s friend and he joined us for the day. We continued around town. We then ate lunch at a cool buffet style place. They made the basics like pizza and pasta, but mainly you were allowed to make your own and choose your toppings. The food was fresh and delicious. We continued yet again with our tour and saw a cathedral along with Geneva’s oldest building.

After a few hours we returned to my friend’s and relaxed until dinner. We toasted to health over sparkling white wine and had an Ethiopian style meal, prepared by my friend’s mother. We gathered again, and went to my friend’s sister’s flat. We met more locals and began New Year’s celebrations. We played a version of Pictionary which started out easy. Each team member picking a film title and having the other team draw it. But we decided to get more difficult and went to historic events. It became interesting as we watched each person attempt to draw a concept differently. Everyone found different things important.

We celebrated for a while until the early hours of the morning.

* * *

A Happy New Year’s

I hope everyone has had a great start to the new year as well and that y'all enjoyed celebrations. May you make resolutions that you will keep and be healthy.

Winter Vacay Part 3 - Paris

December 27^th – Paris Day 1

We arrived in Paris, in the morning, at Gare De L’Est and quickly walked over to Gare du Nord in order to pick up my brother’s friend who flew in to meet us and join us for the vacation. We picked her up and attempted to get tickets for Paris’s train system. After failing once we got help from a local, but ended up at a ticket vendor booth with a real person, not a machine. Worked out for the best and we proceeded to our hotel and check-in. We debated for a little while on what to do, what to see. We decided that the catacombs would be a good place to start.

Outside the catacombs there’s a crepe van and we decided to indulge. My first real crepe! Banana and Nutella. It happened that the queue for the catacombs was too long and we couldn’t get in. With the crepes in hand we were not too bothered, so, we took the time to relax and eat them.

Post deliciousness we walked down to the cemetery. Turned in to it and we soon realized we were in the Jewish section. Crypt stands next to crypt and grave in rows upon rows. Family names appear on each stone and each crypt. Some very familiar names are there and some not. Further down in the cemetery is a grave of a famous. . . Here’s his grave stone. A different take on a standardized idea?

We continued our walking tour at the Arch of Triumph. A giant arch in the center of Paris. It is the conclusion to the Tour de France and a memorial to soldiers who served in the French Revolution. There is the grave of the Unknown Soldier commemorating World War One.

We walked from the arch down the road and stopped at a few shops along the way. Towards the end of our evening we had dinner at a local café. Our dessert was a Banana Split.

December 28^th – Paris Day 2

The Louvre . . . all of it.

We arrived at the Louvre at around 9:30, but didn’t get to start wondering around until 10:00. We decided that since none of us are too much of art crazed beings that we would walk the whole thing. This became to be a draining task. We took one big break but made it through the whole museum available to us by 9:00pm.

The Louvre suited my taste as it, as a building, was a beautiful piece of architecture and art. Walking around in it was just as satisfying as looking at the art it contains. My favorite sections were the sort of sculpture park they had set up as two squares. My favorite pieces were those that depicted stories from the Tanach, statues of the four seasons and a painting of the five senses.

Since we walked the whole thing and tried to view each piece briefly we noticed some themes among works and gave them titles. Here are the three main ones:

The Book of Bunny Death. There is an actual book of bunny death. It is a cute and sick thing of a cartoon bunny dying in many different ways. The Louvre doesn’t host quite a variation, but manages to have many paintings of rabbits hanging from walls or at someone’s feet as killed game. We thought it would be nice to take pictures of all the paintings and compile a Louvre edition of the book.

The Inconvenient Shirt. Pun on the Inconvenient Truth. I hope you caught that. It is no secret that for many years artists have loved painting, sculpting, and photographing women. However, many of the paintings host what we titled the Inconvenient Shirt. This is their piece of clothing that manages to cover their whole body except for one breast. Sure, it makes sense in paintings where a woman is nursing a child. But otherwise, artists seem very good at making it appear that they told all their models to bring loose clothing to their sessions. Make sure their models . . . expose a little. Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction?

The Magical Penis Cloak/Cape. Women seem to have the problem of keeping their clothes on. The Men in most paintings seem to have this problem solved and sometimes appear out of their control. Many paintings we saw will have a naked man or child in them. Somehow, though, there is a piece of clothing just covering their . . . This piece of clothing is amazing. In some paintings it manages to defy gravity or appear out of nowhere.

* * *

We concluded are artistic evening with dinner at a Sushi place. Cheap wine was included along with another Banana Split!

December 29^th – Paris Day 3

Our final day in Paris, we decided to continue being touristy! We made it to the Catacombs on time, but still had to wait three hours to get in. Inside we enjoyed walking along the underground baths and seeing the bones of many dead piled up with skulls as decorations. It was quite creepy, but an interesting and challenging experience. I had never thought of burying the dead in such away. With modern ideals it seems so foreign. We truly value our post life space these days whether it be in the form of ashes or our own space in a graveyard.

We then had a delicious French lunch outside of Notre Dame and afterwards walked around the cathedral. As we walked through it a service was going on with someone chanting and speaking in French to a present audience. Tourists circled the main sitting area walking to chapels and taking pictures of the cathedral. The church now caters to tourists more than to religion.

Next we went to the Eiffel Tower. Prior to queuing to get take the lifts up, I began a new tradition. In St Andrews I agreed to take notes of my friends to places I travel, mainly by town. In that town I would find a recognizable land mark and burn their note there while having my picture taken. My brother took the photos and I lit my friend’s humorous message. “My baguette is bigger than yours. Don’t eat too many frogs… and mind your mustache.”

We then queued and after many hours made it to the top of the Eiffel Tower. We enjoyed the view of Paris and took pictures. I took one of Paris’s highest toilet (note: a urinal would be higher than a sit down john).

After the long day we returned to the hotel, but first stopped by a pizza place for two pizzas and our last Banana Split.

Winter Vacay Part 2 - Berlin

23^rd December – Berlin Day 1

After the many hours of waiting in Heathrow airport with my brother we eventually made it to our flight to Berlin. Arriving in Berlin we discovered something we hadn’t thought of, foolishly. We don’t know any German. This can make it quite difficult to communicate with locals unless you are good at visual expressions and pointing. We must have managed, because we ended up with rail passes and arrived at our hostel just fine. Our next move was to explore the city.

We didn’t know what to expect of Berlin. Our knowledge of the city stops short with World War Two and the knocking down of the Berlin Wall. First, to Berlin’s Christmas markets. We found three of them just blocks apart from each other. Next, we walked through a park and discovered Berlin’s senate. A tall, wide red building with a construction being done all around it and a security guard standing at the front. The senate has only been there since 1991. We then found what Berlin calls Museum Island. A set of four museum’s all along a section of river. We went to each of them for an hour, walking through them at a nice leisurely place. We practiced our photography and enjoyed the surrounding art.

After the museums we headed back to the hostel and then out to dinner. Burritos. Not your traditional German, but most assuredly vegetarian friendly! We ended our night at the local bowling alley. There we had a few number of games and found out that Berlin isn’t too accepting of foreign credit cards. I ran 400m to the nearest ATM machine in order to get cash and pay them.

24^th and 25^th December – Berlin Day 2 and 3

We took these two days lightly because it was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The 24^th we mainly stayed in the hostel, working and relaxing. We rented a pool table, a family hobby. The 25^th we went out to see a movie and walk around the Berlin Sony Center. A place of modern technology and cool design. Very modern looking and well lit for Christmas. We also went out for an Indian Mexican dinner as we couldn’t find Chinese. Jews will understand this. Sorry we couldn’t keep with tradition!

26^th December –Berlin Day 4

We started our day by taking one of the Berlin’s trains to the end of its route. There we walked down and fine one end of what’s left of the Berlin wall. What was once a division between two powerful nations and two very separate ideals of life is now a memorial and monument to modern art and world peace. Some of it is also designated to mockery of a border gate.

After the wall we headed to HBF, Berlin’s biggest train station. Its five stories tall and really long. We walked the entirety of it. Then we visited the Reichstag and a nearby plaza. The Reichstag has a huge field in front of it that currently acts as a park. People were playing with their dogs and many people were just strolling along. The plaza has an arch that has a famous picture with the Nazi flag hanging from its top. Now there is both a menorah and a Christmas tree there (A little Chanukah fun!). People dress up as war figures and take pictures with tourists.

Last we went back to the train station for some UK style fish and chips, back to the hostel, and then back to the train station for some gelato. We then waited for our overnight train to Paris.