Michael and watched a delightful movie last night, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which is almost entirely set in India. I love it.
Michael, who has a pulled muscle in his leg and was lying on the couch swaddled in a blanket, was less enthused, but I attribute that to our ages. He is 16. I am 50 and much closer to retirement age.
It was a chance to watch some amazing actors [Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson] plus some British character actresses whose faces I know but not their names [Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie]. All the performances are outstanding.
The story is about a group of retirees who for various reasons don't want to stay in England and so they go to The Marigold Hotel to retire. All of them are delightful, witty, intelligent, etc. - except Maggie Smith's character, who starts off the movie decidedly UNpleasant but ends up much nicer. She is a versatile enough actress and pulls that subtle transformation off flawlessly.
It's also directed by John Madden, who directed one of my all-time favorite films Shakespeare in Love.
Huge bonus: feel like I've been to India now. Watch the trailer and tell me you don't want to see this.
The character played by Judi Dench blogs about India, and we hear her blog entries in the narration. And thus my only faint criticism of the film.These snippets are heard in the trailer:
"This is a new and different world. The challenge is to cope with it, and not just to cope, but thrive."
"India, like life itself I suppose, is about what you bring to it."
The problem is that if you're writing a daily blog, which I know something about [cough cough] you are not going to be profound or even pithy, every stinking day.
My blog about Michael's adoption was a lot about my 4 weeks in Kazakhstan, the most exotic place I have ever been. A sample:
A word about yurts, and Kazakhstan. As best I can tell it’s a hut made of heavy felt, and the nomadic folks who lived in Kaz in ancient times always lived in yurts. Kaz is part of the old Silk Road, which is the route traders took from Europe to China for hundreds of years. The culture was built around horses, which is why you find horsemeat on the menu a lot, even now.
Most of my time was spent in the orphanage, visiting Michael, which I tried to document in as much detail as possible, since Mother and many of my friends and relatives were reading every day:
Michael spent some time coloring in a Lion King coloring book I had brought him, and we played with the translation device. He was able to type in a lot of Russian words and get the English word and seemed fascinated. I also quizzed him on his American words – please, thank you, boy, girl, mother, father, brother, sister, dog. He practiced writing his American name. We sang the ABC song.
[looking down the street from my hotel in Petropavlovsk]
I wish I had been able to say profound things every day, but I am not that good a writer. I tried to not dwell too much on the weird or negative stuff, like the fact if you are in a store and have to use the bathroom, too bad. Most public places will not have a clean bathroom for you, or let you use the bathroom at all. You can easily order something like soup and inadvertently eat horsemeat. The streets are filled with filthy snow most of the time. Most of the women dress like hookers. That sort of thing.
I love reading travel blogs by real people who are honest about their experiences. It makes me feel like I've been there.
I have an old friend from high school who is in Italy and posting some nice photos, but I want to READ about her trip, not just see photos on Facebook. I know, I am being unreasonable, not everyone has the ability to write, but still...
I like to live vicariously.
Two of the attorneys I work with are in San Francisco. I'd love to hear about that.
My cousin is fixing to move to Miami. I'd like to hear how his Spanish is coming along.
There are interesting people all around me going to interesting places and I'd like to hear their stories, and forget about all my caretaking duties and my 30 item To Do List [from hell] and the fact that I lost the cap to the car's gas tank yesterday and my kitchen is dirty, and dirty dishes seem to multiply no matter how often I run the dishwasher. REAL LIFE! Ack.
If you are a friend or family member and you are reading this, did you know you can go on Blogger and start a blog, for free, and write about whatever you like? You can post every day, or once a month, or just once and then not again. Posting photos is easy. There's a whole big world out there to blog about and blogging is EASY PEASY y'all.
I have no plans to ever get on an airplane again, please God, so I want to read about people I know in exotic places. Or even just in Florida.
So start typing.
