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Colombia

I’ve just returned from a week-long trip to Cartagena, Colombia. The occasion was Kathryn’s brother’s wedding, and it was a beautiful visit. We stayed at a resort facing the Carribean, and it was mostly a resort-centred week: bodysurfing in the ocean, swimming in the pools, and enjoying unlimited piña coladas. The wedding itself was lovely, and a great chance to meet Kathryn’s extended family.

Cartagena itself was a surprise to me. My only prior visit to Latin America was a daytrip to Tijuana, and I knew the poverty there was a side-effect of its border location. Cartagena seemed fairly prosperous, but perhaps they keep it looking nice for the large tourist industry. It had a lovely old town, with a very European feel: pedestrian streets, squares with cafes and restaurants, and old cathedrals. The new town was bustling and modern, and the little beach-focused neighbourhoods seemed quiet and easygoing. Overall, the place felt like it would fit in on the European side of the Mediterranean: bits of Marseille, bits of the sleepy beach towns on the Adriatic coast of Italy, bits of the Costa del Sol in Spain. Mind you, there was a strong police and military presence around to achieve this feel: police everywhere, machine-gun toting guards here and there, and even a camouflaged chopper overhead at one point. That didn’t really interfere with the experience too much, though.

And of course it was nice and hot: a comfortable 30 degrees every day, and warm nights. I managed to avoid a sunburn, but I got a wide variety of jellyfish stings crisscrossing my body during a snorkelling daytrip. It was great to visit a reef again, for the first time since my visit to Lady Elliott Island in the Great Barrier Reef at the age of seven. The reef was deeper than I expected: you had to dive a good 3 to 4 meters down to reach the coral and fish. In some ways, that made it more rewarding, since you had to really work at it to get a good view of the brilliant colours.

The buffet served weird and tasty fruits: lulo, pitaya, mora and the tangy tamarillo (tree tomato). Oranges were green, limes and plantains were popular, but lemons and bananas weren’t around anywhere. Confused yet?

I’d highly recommend coastal Colombia to North Americans. It seems to be quite popular with Latin American tourists, but there were few white faces around – probably scared off by press coverage of the country.

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Films, 2005

For the record books as I close the year, here’s a list of all the movies I first saw in 2005. The theme of movies this year: laziness and television. The movies that don’t show up on the list are the movies I watched for a second (or third…) time – and that’s the bulk of them. I rewatched an awful lot of films this year, often because a) Eric was watching them already; b) I was too lazy to go to the video store, so I hit up the kommunal film collection; c) I wanted to watch them with Kathryn.

I also watched television-on-DVD for the first time this year. I’ve always ignored tv as the lamentable bastard child of cinema, but I discovered that Joss Whedon makes some very entertaining series. To my shock, Buffy the Vampire Slayer season two was excellent, and season three was okay. His later series Firefly is superb, as was its movie followup Serenity. Before now, the only time I sat down and followed the slower-paced character development of a television series was X-Files, and I got impatient with that after a season. Plus, when I watch the shows on DVD, I’m not tied to a schedule or forced to wait through painful advertising… a vastly better way to experience television, I must say.

So it goes. I think I’ll get a bit more adventurous once I move out of the Kommune. While I’m there, it’s very easy to just watch 10 minutes of whatever Eric’s watching, get queasy from the gruesome violence, and swear off movies for a week. Some day, I’ll get back into films, I imagine. Meanwhile, I watched 41 new films in 2005 – less than one a week. I’m going soft.

  • the man who knew too much. usa, 1956.
  • a beautiful mind. usa, 2001.
  • before sunrise. usa, 1995.
  • syriana. usa, 2005.
  • king kong. usa, 2005.
  • i heart huckabees. usa, 2005.
  • matrix revolutions. usa, 2004.
  • primer. usa, 2004.
  • the constant gardener. uk, 2005.
  • wallace and gromit: curse of the were-rabbit. uk, 2005.
  • serenity. usa, 2005.
  • layer cake. uk, 2005.
  • bleu (blue). france, 1993.
  • broken flowers. usa, 2005.
  • it’s all gone pete tong. uk / canada, 2005.
  • bullitt. usa, 1968.
  • charlie and the chocolate factory. usa, 2005.
  • blow. usa, 2003.
  • batman begins. usa, 2005.
  • the interpreter. usa, 2005.
  • star wars episode iii. usa, 2005.
  • the manchurian candidate. usa, 1962.
  • sin city. usa, 2005.
  • enron: the smartest guys in the room. usa, 2005.
  • the conversation. usa, 1974.
  • kung fu hustle. hong kong, 2004.
  • shaolin soccer. hong kong, 2000.
  • the killer. hong kong, 1989.
  • downfall. germany, 2004.
  • napoleon dynamite. usa, 2004.
  • be cool. usa, 2005.
  • born into brothels: calcutta’s red light kids. india / usa, 2004.
  • fast, cheap and out of control. usa, 1997.
  • million dollar baby. usa, 2004.
  • cidade de deos (city of god). brazil, 2002.
  • incident at loch ness. uk, 2004.
  • groundhog day. usa, 1993.
  • the life aquatic with steve zissou. usa, 2004.
  • fa yeung nin wa (in the mood for love). hong kong, 2000.
  • die salzmänner von tibet (the saltmen of tibet). germany, 1997.
  • house of flying daggers. china, 2004.
  • the breakfast club. usa, 1985.
  • eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. usa, 2004.
  • control room. usa, 2003.
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Ashes to Ashes

My server’s hard disk seems to have died, one hour before I left the house for a two-month stay in Toronto. Since it hosted my website, I lost a lot of data, including everyone’s comments to this blog. Meanwhile, I’m doing the web hosting through another company, and on a new domain (davidpritchard.org). I’ve also killed off most of the old website and I’m slowly moving everything into WordPress.

I’m convinced of the blog way of doing things. It means admitting that most of the content on my home page is just a snapshot in time, and inherently dated information. Instead of trying to keep categorized information up to date, I keep my dated information categorized – a more honest representation of the underlying data, I think.

But I’m sure I’ll change my mind again soon. The one true good thing about the blog is that I can coast on other people’s templates, and get an attractive look for the whole thing with relatively little effort. Sure, I had to customize the title bar, but everything else is borrowed.

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Fog

So what’s up with the weather? After four days of living in a cloud, it’s starting to feel strange. This would never happen in Toronto. I was out biking on Sunday night, and I really couldn’t see more than two metres ahead of me in the dark alley, and maybe 15 metres ahead on the brightly lit streets.