Tan Loc/Back in HCMC

I should tell you that the Very Long Drive I had talked about was long because we drove down to Can Tho (4.5 hours) then continued on to Tan Loc which is a little island - we took one ferry to get to Can Tho and one more to get to Tan Loc - which was 2.5 hours away from Can Tho. And then we pretty much turn around and drove right back.. to Can Tho, thank goodness, not HCMC.

The next day, I headed back to HCMC by myself. This was a pretty rushed trip for me since I had to get back to work the next day :( I took a local bus back to HCMC, which dropped me at a terminal about 10 miles outside the city, then I had RUN RUN RUN! to get on an even-more-local bus - the sort of rickety bus that literally did not even stop for passengers to get on. It would just kind of slow down and good luck getting on!

I really only managed by the kindness of strangers who spoke a smattering of English and could understand my mangling of Vietnamese place names.

Back in HCMC, I had time to spare so I visited the Reunification Palace, which was awesome. A real trip. Think: Get Smart meets Austin Powers... except, I guess, if you think about the historical context, not very funny. The whole place is frozen in the swinging 70s, with upstairs meeting rooms filled with Chinoiserie, a game room (a game room!), and crazy basement military intelligence rooms. And the phones. The place was filled with retro phones. Loved it.

Hangin' out in the Mekong Delta

OK, I really shouldn't just post unflattering pictures of Vietnam, so here is a picture of my lovely drip coffee and me relaxing on a hammock. Vietnamese <3 hammocks too! Not just the Cambodians!

Can Tho

The next day, we took a drive down to the Mekong Delta, and it was a Very Long Drive. (And, my camera battery had died, so for my entire trip in Vietnam I could only take photos with my iphone. Sob, sob.)

Once out of HCMC, we were really starting to get into the countryside. We stopped by a roadside cafe and had a great cup of Vietnamese coffee and then - this is the exciting part - we had to use the bathroom. I was led into a tin shack, and quickly sussed out that I had to pee on the concrete floor, which was conveniently slanted on one end towards a little hole that opened out into the nearby stream. There was a tub of water you could scoop to "flush". I wanted to cry.



When I was done, I found out that the cafe proprietors had kindly let us "out-of-towners" use the SHOWER to pee in, cos it was properly covered. THIS was the real toilet. I didn't want to cry anymore.

HCMC

I went to Vietnam and I forgot to blog afterward! It's been too long since I've travelled...

Let me start with an ode to the traffic to Vietnam:

Motorcycles swarm.
Cars lurch, powered by their horns.
Traffic lights are
Confounding - and only a suggestion anyway.
Zebra crossings are decorative. So pretty.
Just go.

Below is the view from our hotel room.



I loved it - straight into some weird airwell right out of Brazil. Mind you, the hotel itself was a not-very-inexpensive hotel that was perfectly nice and clean on the inside. But the view! Ha. I figured I hadn't come to HCMC to sit in my room and look out the window, so I could live with it.

Singinging

Adventures on the red carpet

I am back from Berlin, so these posts are belated, yet again. Sorry. I had a great time in Berlin but it was hectic and exhausting, hence the lack of posts. But no fear! I shall be caught up.

And so... I was not ON the red carpet, but beside it. On the last day of the Talent Campus, there was a closing party for all of us. The party was held at the same building as the Berlinale Palast, the big movie theatre where they had the major competition screenings.

When a bunch of us arrived, we were mysteriously and suddenly prevented from going downstairs to the party venue. We were informed that Dieter Kosslick, the man who runs the Berlinale, has "requested" that we stand by the red carpet to welcome the famous guests. What? We said. No, we want to go downstairs. Where there is food and drink. But it was kind of those requests where basically we had no choice. Apparently, it looked bad that there weren't enough fans waiting by the red carpet, so we had to be there as space fillers!!

So we were hustled behind some barricades and basically penned up beside the red carpet so that we could wait in the freezing cold for some stars to arrive - the stars were a French actress I don't know called Elsa and Kristin Scott Thomas. When they arrived, many real (and fake) fans yelled "Kristin!" and "Elsa!". But in European accents, so it sounded more like "Kristeeen!". We tried striking poses so that we could end up as dramatic background in some of these paparazzi photos.

East Berlin

Here I am in Berlin - for the most part, East Berlin to be exact. Wintry bare trees, brick and concrete, grey skies, everything bleak and muted. Ah, I love it. I'd also forgotten one other thing I love about Europe - sparkling water. You can get it ANYWHERE.

The Berlinale and the Berlin Talent Campus got off to a running start for me. Lots of great panels and talks, and also screenings I am trying to squeeze in in between. Everything is bustling and crowded, yet very chill. It's a good vibe to have in such a big festival. It's also nice that it's so big because you're always running into friends or meeting lots of interesting new people.

So far, I've sampled some German cuisine (including the must-have Currywurst). This pretty much means eating lots of sausages. Not that I'm complaining. But it's become a daily challenge to find vegetables to eat. Any vegetable. Anything that isn't a sausage.

Many people say that Berlin has uninteresting cuisine but this much I'll say: it has the Best Bread in the world. And today, we went to KaDeWe and had us the BEST HOT CHOCOLATE IN THE WORLD. The. Best. (Thanks for the tip, Grace!)



Besides the food, my two favourite moments so far have been listening to separate talks by Stephen Daldry and Mike Leigh. Lots of great insight from both. I love the no-nonsense, get on with it, British sensibility they both have as well. No room for indulging ultra-Method actors... ha! Mike Leigh said, in closing: "I'm going to give you some advice, even though no one asked for it, so clearly you don't want any, but here it is: Never Compromise".

Postscript

Angkor Wat

And finally - Angkor Wat.

We did the sunrise thing (after one false start...), and it was nice, but, dare I say it, kind of overrated. I mean overrrated cos the place is already so amazing and breathtaking, the sunrise thing seemed like a tourist gimmick.

You should know by now that Angkor Wat is full of tourists. Whaddya gonna do. I mean, there was even a tethered hot air balloon in my view looking out from the Angkor Wat temple! With that in sight, and so many people around you, it was hard to try and imagine what it must have been like centuries ago. I'd like to imagine it was kind of... magical. Ah, perhaps I am romanticising it. But you look at the architecture of the temples and there's no denying it was just so... GRAND.



It was also a shame too that some temples had scaffolding and green tarps in certain places, due to the reconstruction work. But I guess that's a good thing, though.

Visiting the temples involved climbing a lot of precarious rock stairs. Tip: visit Ta Prohm (aka the "Tomb Raider" temple) first!! Just book it over there. Otherwise, when you get there at 10 in the morning, like I did, it will be full of Korean tourists, who are the Japanese tourists of the 21st century. Not that there's anything wrong with them, they're fine, but I couldn't even get a photo of the temple without a Korean in my frame.

Then we got temple fatigue. So we decided to go to one of the "outlying" temples. Only 49km away, we thought. So we stupidly told our tuk-tuk driver to take us there. Tip: don't go by tuk-tuk! Riding through clay countryside roads with potholes the size of buffaloes was a stupid thing to do. Poor driver. And we got coated in dust.

And then we arrived at the "outlying temple" (Kbal Spean) at 3:10pm, it was closed! It closes at 3pm! Ha ha. What dolts we were for not doing our research. Duh. Slap ourselves on our foreheads, turn around and make that arduous 2 hour (2 hour!) tuk-tuk journey back. Then it starts to rain. (Poor driver!) Then a coconut tree falls in the middle of the road. True. But the villagers came out and sawed it apart and the road was cleared in no time!



OK, one last Angkor Wat story. I met this precocious little kid at one of the temples (Banteay Srei) hanging around. And this is what we said:

Kid: Candy?
Me: Candy? (look around, point at me)
Kid: Candy!
Me: Sorry, I don't have any candy.
Kid: Pen?
Me: Pen? No, sorry, don't have that either.

Kid thinks. Face lights up, points outside.

Kid: Ice cream?
Me: (worn down by intense cuteness) OK. Ice cream.

I realize something.

Me: But just you!

Later, he tries to bring a couple other kids with him, but I'm adamant about only getting one ice cream. That's right, I'm the cheap aunt. Only one ice cream. Share it with all your siblings.

--> Siem Reap

Took the boat back to Siem Reap, up the Tonle Sap. Water levels were too low on the river, so a bus took us part of the way, and then we hopped on a boat where the river turns into a lake.

The entire Tonle Sap Lake is brown. Like milk tea.

The boat was kind of fun, but apparently it was more fun for me cos I am short and not a large, full-grown man for whom the seats were kinda cramped. Oh well. Lucky me! :) The boat ride was wonderful and mind-numbing at the same time. It's like 4 hours of no-thinking on the water. Bliss. Got sunburned on one arm. (The arm sticking out the side of the boat).

Boatman

We saw floating villages - fishermen were out casting nets, kids were playing in the water... I took pictures. Then I felt bad, cos these people now live with tourists driving through their villages, gawking. That's what I was doing - gawking and taking pictures.

Petrol

Phnom Penh

Did I spell that right?

Took the bus to Phnom Penh the very next morning. It was an ok ride, about 6 hours through countryside. Lots and lots of wooden houses on stilts, water buffaloes in the field, coconut trees, mud. I really loved it - can't explain why! (I shouldn't be telling you this, but I kept thinking about landmines - we didn't see any, of course - and half expecting some water buffalo in the distance to suddenly go "boompf" and go flying into the air. Nope, didn't happen.)

In Phnom Penh my uncle met up with some missionaries. We stayed at the guest room of a school the missionaries run. They were super nice and took us around town. We visited a Korean church - service in Khmer (oops, that was in Siem Reap not PP), Central Market - ate some bugs, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum - super depressing and scary. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is housed in the actual S-21 prison used by the Khmer Rouge. The actual building. The actual cells. The actual wooden beams where they strung people up. It was pretty wrenching, as you can imagine.

Cambodians <3 hammocks

Markets in Cambodia are these amazing, filthy, colourful places. There are the "tourist sections" with the clothes and trinkets, and the "locals section" where they sell meat and vegetables. Swarms and swarms of flies surround the food... they must have stomachs of steel, these Cambodians.


Mmm..

Bug degustation menu:
1. Cricket - crunchy, with a hint of bug aroma. Light and delish.
2. Silkworm larva - al dente on the outside and soft and creamy on the inside. Totally gross.
3. Ginormous spider - surprisingly sweet! Perhaps coated with... something sweet.

Actually I only ate a spider leg cos I was pathetic and all bugged-out by then. I gave the woman at the stall US$1 for the bugs I sampled and she proceeded to doggy bag more bugs for me! I was like: noooo!

Cambodia, summarized

This is a very belated post. I didn't post while I was in Cambodia cos i didn't bring my laptop and even though the hotel had decent Dell PCs, the internet connection was the speed of mud. Which there was a lot of, in Cambodia - mud.

So anyway, I spent a week in Cambodia - yes, birthplace of Maddox Jolie-Pitt, to put it in context.

Arrived first in Siem Reap, it had stormed just a while before we landed (we had to circle to wait out the storm), which made everything nice and wet and made the dust nice and muddy.

Here are some pictures.



The obligatory baby on a motorcyle photo.

PPP afterthoughts

So all the acronyms are now over – PIFF, PPP, AFM. PPP (or, Pusan Promotion Plan) was what I was directly participating in. Interestingly, PPP is basically just like UCLA’s Pitchfest, except the tables are turned – instead of taking a project around and pitching (and grovelling) to various companies sitting at tables in a large hall, YOU are sitting at a table in a large hall and various companies who might be interested in your project come around and see you. Yeah, it’s nicer this way!

It was cool to be in the PPP with notable directors such as Tsai Ming-Liang and Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Of course they were not at their tables pitching. Pen-ek was unfortunately not there (alas). As part of his director's statement in the PPP project book, he stated in a whole separate paragraph that in his new film, "A lot of close-ups will be used." Sweet.

TML conducted a rather bummer, bitter "master class" which I won't go into.


Cigarettes on offer at the festival. Free! Smoke wherever you like! Even at the food buffet! Lovely.

OK. Now. To write. Back to work. Over and out.

Seoul subway

In every subway station, a cabinet of gas masks. Nice.

Motorcycles on the sidewalk

Sorry for the delay in posts. These did not all happen in one day.

Seoul. Man, all my clothes smell like barbeque now. :) Mm. Meat.

Fact. Taxis in Korea do not make u-turns. If you try to hail a cab on the side of the road that is in the opposite direction to where you are going, the taxi will not turn around or go around the block. The driver will actually make you get out, cross the street and take another taxi. The first time this happened, we had no idea what the taxi driver was ranting and gesticulating about, so we stayed put and he had to take us to our destination, but boy, he seemed really put out (even though it was just a 5 minute ride!).


A GIANT BOWL OF BIBIMBAP.







Next two pictures: octopus stew (not moving). Yummy or what. (no, it really was yummy.)

Old boy

Yesterday, I did a dumb thing. I saw that there was an open talk between a Korean (director?) and Kore-eda (I don't remember his full name - the guy who did NOBODY KNOWS) and I was excited. I wanted to see Kore-eda speak! So I went down to the PIFF pavilion and it wasn't till I sat down that I realized: waitaminute. One dude's Korean and the other's Japanese. How the heck am I going to understand this talk? Well. I didn't.

Here's a picture of them in the flesh, which is just about as much as I got out of this open talk.

PIFF/AFM continues

To make up for no photos yesterday, here is a picture of a whole entire pig that was carved up at the Japan party. The Japan party was the best party so far. Most of the parties are identified by where the organizing delegates are from, e.g. the Hong Kong party, the Japan party, the Taiwan party, etc. Singapore is clearly too cheap to have a party. Ha. We do have a suite and a booth, and today, I was peckish, so I stopped by and they offered me cup noodles. I ate it. Of course.

And here's a photo of fans who love taking their picture with pictures of stars.

More meetings today, but just one more tomorrow! Hopefully I can catch at least one screening, though so far I've already missed all the movies that I really wanted to see.

Oh, the food

(Sorry, no photos as blogger is being uncooperative..)

Long days, meetings, meetings, parties, tired. Trust me when i say that "parties" are not generally as fun as they sound. Parties are just another just-as-tiring event where you meet and schmooze people and you know how exhausting that can be. Not to mention the fact that I've just about had enough of cold, crappy free party food too. Yuck. The upside is that I've been able to catch up and hang out with a few friends from LA whom I haven't seen in a while.

Now, the food... my food adventures in Korea continue. Last night a few of us ventured to a seafood restaurant by the beachfront (since Pusan is supposedly known for its seafood). We ordered raw fish, and bbq shellfish. Our mistake was sitting next to the tank. They pull out a poor fish into a bucket, as well as a squid. And you watch your dinner squirm, thrash and gasp its final breaths before being taken inside to be prepared for you to eat 10 minutes later. Did you know that squid wheeze really loudly when they are gasping for breath? Yes, it is just as grotesque as it sounds.

I also learned that raw squid, even after it's been chopped into little pieces, continues to MOVE for well over an hour. I couldn't stop staring at it after I found out. The pieces sort of contract and its surface moves continuously. I'm talking about a roughly one-inch CHOPPED UP piece of squid! I was told that raw octopus is worse and that its suction cups will actually fight you when you put it in your mouth. Ohhh.... I did not eat the raw squid. Not the part that moved anyway.

I found Korean seafood (raw and cooked) to be generally tougher and chewier than I am used to. Since I have no point of reference, I don't know if this is the way it usually is, or just the way this restaurant did it. I suspect the former, though.

Now, lunch today. Went out with friends Joan and Grace and Grace can speak Korean - yay! She brought us to a nice, authentic Korean bbq place where we took our shoes off, sat down and ate some great kalbi, bacon (which you wrap in vegetable leaves and eat) and spicy bacon kalbi (I think). Yum. Koreans sure do know how to bbq their meat!

Co-rea

I'm here in Busan (or Pusan, depend on which signboard you are reading) and so far it's been unreal. I'm being treated so nicely - pick ups at every airport and a chauffeur to the hotel! What did I do to deserve this?

It looks like I'm staying at the hotel where the stars are because when I arrived, there was a crowd of young women and obasan-types (what is the Korean word equivalent?) toting cameras, being held back by security and eagerly awaiting some Korean stars I am sure I would not recognize. Though, apparently, Andy Lau is also here at my hotel. This information was printed in one of the Asian Film Market guides - which hotel everyone is staying in - in what my friend Joan and I immediately dubbed "the stalker's guide". They even told you which dates everyone was checking in and out! No room numbers, though...

Here is a picture of my first meal in Korea (excluding the airplane bibimbap) - a bowl of udon noodles from a small mom-and-pop place in Busan.
Sadly, the influences of tourism and the PIFF have resulted in an Outback Steakhouse and TGI Fridays near the beachfront. Having said that, tomorrow I am heading to Starbucks...

The other photo is of some korean star I don't recognize (he's the guy in the black shirt and khaki jacket). I keep stumbling onto crowds of fans/stars. The PIFF is in full swing by the beach. The AFM (film market) starts tomorrow, as do my meetings. Wish me luck.