Snow Day, Elephant, Good Bye Lenin!, Dracula, Blind Shaft...
"One of these words is not like the others..."
It would be Snow Day! Today was a snow day for me, sort of. I did try to make it out to school, but the teacher who drives me in was sick, so I had to take the bus. Three hours later I arrived 3/4 of the way to work, in time to miss the bus. There was no point in me going any further, because the next bus was after my day was over. There's only about 3cm of snow here, but people are going crazy. There was a tiny bump in the road (by Canadian standards), so traffic was severely blocked up.
Another problem with snow in Lille is that it covers up the dog crap that is all over the sidewalks. You just have to hope that you don't step in any (good luck, it's hard enough when you can see where it is!).
This past weekend there was a film festival in Lille, with the best films of 2003. First of all I went to see Elephant, an American film (I don't know if it came out in North America or not, any insight?) by Gus van Sant based on the shootings at Columbine High. It was quite controversial, but won two prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. I can't really say that I enjoyed it, but it was a good film.
Then I went to see Good Bye Lenin!, a German film. It was about a lady who falls into a coma just before the re-unification, then wakes up eight months later. The doctor tells the son that she may relapse if she is subjected to too much stress, so he pretends that East and West Germany are still separate. I thought it was a great movie.
On Monday I went to see the play Dracula, in English, at a theatre in Lille with one of my schools.
Then I went to see Blind Shaft, a Chinese movie about miners, that was banned in China. The movie shows problems with China's mining system (many mines collapse on the workers), at the same time as it tells the story of two crooked miners and teaches a moral lesson.
A+