sneeuw

Winter has finally arrived!

This past week it snowed a tiny bit, then hailed twice (or maybe it was frozen rain), then snowed again. I'm grateful that it's not quite the snot-freezing cold that you Chicagoans are getting, but it is finally time to break out the scarf.

I took today's photo after the final snow, on Thursday afternoon. It's my bike light. By Friday morning, all traces of the winter wonderland had vanished, making me glad that I went out while I had the chance.

Happy winter!

Rotterdam

Two Sundays ago we went to Rotterdam. The main objective was the Rotterdam International Film Festival, but a big secondary goal was to see some of the cool and weird modern architecture that the city is famous for.

We started the day by meeting Joe and Latha. Joe works with Casey and is married to Latha, who worked with Casey in Boston.

Upon arrival in Rotterdam, we quickly found the festival headquarters and picked up the movie tickets we'd reserved. The headquarters were very slickly decorated (or "film-y," as Latha observed).

We set off to experience some wacky architecture. Rotterdam was almost entirely demolished in WWII, so the city started fresh after the war. And the city did not disappoint. At every intersection was an opportunity for gawking.

Today's photo is of the Kijk-Kubus ("Cube Houses" or, more literally, "Show Cubes"). It's a series of houses, each made up of a cube tilted 45 degrees. One was open to visitors, so we went inside. The floor plan is open, but the angled walls pinch the space at places, effectively separating the space off into rooms. And they're larger than I expected: three tall stories, although the top floor is just one sun room (with a VIEW).

After the Kijk-Kubus, we ate lunch and then walked to the Erasmus Bridge. The bridge is on the 500 euro note as the symbol of Europe's modern architecture, and it is indeed impressive (coincidentally, my Google search for just the right image returned *only* that photo, taken by a postdoc we know at Northwestern). Having lived in Boston, we all thought it looked like the Zakim Bridge. We continued to admire the spaces in Rotterdam: at the foot of the bridge was a nice cafe with outdoor seating and more modern art.

From the bridge we walked to a park. At the park's north end is a museum, which seemed to be overflowing with sculptures that leaked into the park. My favorite was the 20 foot tall bent screw (flat head). Next we warmed up in another cafe and parted ways, they to the Maritime Museum, Casey and I to our first movie.

I should explain a major attraction of the festival. In theaters here, all non-Dutch movies are subtitled in Dutch. This doesn't matter for English-language movies, but we do occasionally like to see non-American movies. However, at an international festival, the prints are usually subtitled in English, since a festival print will probably be shown in the Netherlands only a few times, and English is now the European lingua franca (pun intended). So, our goal for the festival was to see non-English-language films.

To that end, we chose a series of short films by a Brazilian director, Kleber Mendonca Filho, and an Indonesian feature film called Opera Jawa.

The program of shorts was, incredibly, scheduled for just one hour. They opened the theater 15 minutes late, showed the first four films, and interviewed the director, and then the director showed clips from movies that he liked. At this point we made our escape, as they were about to show one more short, interview the director, and then have some "surprise bonus." The four films we saw were shown chronologically, and Casey and I agreed that the most recent (Electrodomestica) was the most enjoyable. The two middle ones, though, were also fun to watch. The second film was a ghost story from the director's elementary school, about a ghost haunting the school bathrooms (he testified that he and his friends used to wait until they got home to pee). The film was shot in digital and the actors were actively blurred, so that their images only came into focus for an instant now and then. The third film was a series of still photographs that told a story about a girl whose curiosity about a green record causes a pair of green gloves to come after her mother, removing her limbs one at a time.

The Indonesian feature film, Opera Jawa, was commissioned in 2006 by a film festival in Vienna. It's a "baroque opera" with Indonesian-style music and dance. It is a beautiful film, with great dancing. The sets, too, were interesting. Several dances made use of woven cones that are used for cooking rice and protecting food from flies. One memorable dance had a woman being chased by several men hiding under giant woven cones that covered their entire bodies. They danced her into this spiral that was reminiscent of a hedge maze, only made out of stacked coconut husks. The director was present at this screening, too, and had some interesting points about the story. He had modified the ancient legend, two kings fighting over a queen, to a wealthy businessman, a poor potter, and the potter's wife. He explained that he thought of kings as having power over land, and that the potter uses the earth in an analogy to a king, which was a neat point that I hadn't thought of.

At the same time, Joe and Latha were watching a different movie in the same theater complex, so afterwards we met up, grabbed some pret-a-manger food for the road, and caught a train home, tired but satisfied with our day out.