Kinda looking forward to Easter already!

Fri Jan 27: so emmy and rob live a few km from rotterdam center so I left around 9 am to get to the tourist info center. It was pretty simple going to the center. The shopping center which I passed thru was very quiet! I arrived before tourist info opened so I quickly went to the bookstore on the corner to look for a bicycle atlas for Germany but because Germany " is so big" according to the worker, its broken up into several smaller books so I didn't buy anything in the end. Then I went to the tourist info and picked up a walking tour brochure. Then I saw they didn't have mini cards so I went to the library, back through the shopping area to pick some up (bit livelier..what a difference 20 min made!), then did a slight bit of my walking tour on my way to the box office for the rotterdam film festival, which brought me to a nice ww2 sculpture where 2 men represented the past, a woman the present, and a child the future.  (these war sculptures are in every city..a bit nicer than the memorials England has). I bought a ticket for a movie called "waiting for snow in my sapong".. or something like that. The Malaysian word for village. then I went to the boyman museum which had lots of art! The place was massive. And of course there was the annoying teenage school group going around (most of them taller than me..but then again even 10 yr old girls here are taller than me). So I saw plenty of golden age paintings, and even really old paintings from the 14th cent, made by one of the 2 brothers "who invented painting". The galleries led up to 20th cent paintings. There were also new exhibits, which were a bit strange, so I spent most of my time in the permanent collection. So I saw the pointillists, impressionists, and van gogh, Salvador dali and lots of good stuff. There was a room called the "rejects" and they change it every so often with art from the collections that didn't make the final cut for the permanent display, which I think is a real good idea. So my movie started at 5:15 pm so I left the museum around 4:50 pm to give myself plenty of time to get there, even though it was kind of close by. So I had to cross over the river which I got to fine but after the bridge I got a bit lost but asked for directions and I was right around the corner so I quickly took pics of the hotel new York, which was the old headquarters where the Holland-America ship line was. So I then went to the theatre and got there just on time. There weren't many people there actually, esp for a Friday night. So there was an intro from one of the directors (the film was a bunch of short films) and then it started. I was afraid the subtitles were going to be in chenglish but it actually was near perfect English! It was all about raising awareness about radioactivity in that part of Asia, as it doesn't snow in Malaysia normally! The genres were different for the films which was good. Some were funny (soldiers in the rainforest grew hands out of their winkies, and another about an oilyman burglar who only virgins can see, so a guy finds out that his father is a virgin cause he sees him and the dad says
"oh no I'm not, it must be the radioactivity that's making me see him"). Then there were 2 dramatic ones, I don't see how this related to radioactivity but a Thai girl goes to live in a Malaysian village with her infant and the girls bully her at work and her boss is strange and then her baby is taken from her. Yeah I didn't get that one, so I wasn't a fan. The one I liked the best was a documentary of an elderly woman who has a 20something yr old son with a mental illness. She worked at a brick factory when she was pregnant with him and she didn't know it at the time but they were dumping radioactive waste and toxic Chemicals into the environment, and then her son was born with that birth defect. And this started happened all around the neighborhood till finally the village found out the truth about the company. She quit the factory and they tried to write her off but she refused the money. They were saying "you are poor, you need this money" (she had like 5 kids) and she said "if I take your money and let you continue doing what your doing then more children will be born sick. what good is your money then?" So that was quite a noble thing. Unfortunately the doc didn't touch on what happened to that company after that and if conditions have since improved. Then the last film (the one directed by the guy who gave the intro) was a bit weird as well. It was like pulp fiction where the scenes are out of sequence, so that's real hard to follow. a little boys mother is dying, then the next scene the father is crying at work cause she died, then the next scene is of the mother taking pics of the snow Malaysia when she was a teenager. Then the next scene is the same scene as the opening scene! So yeah confusing. Then after the movie there was a Q&A session but no one had any questions so the MC just asked him some. He said lots of Malaysian movies are improvized, so he went in with barely any script and no story board, so there was a clash with him working with western filmmakers who wanted to see a story written out. Then after the movie I went back to emmy and robs. Because it was now dark, I didn't recognize the streets, so I missed my turn a few times and eventually asked someone for directions and made it back. E&R had their own film festival movies to get to so they had already gone by the time I got back so I just ate some cheese and bread and went to bed!