A quick round up....
1. Thank you Robbie for a wonderful weekend in Milano!! I had so much fun on our quest to discover new "Davids"; our coffee chats were as ever enlightening and oh so very entertaining! It was great to have some normal time to spend together aka non conference time indulging in some somewhat inappropriate storytelling! Thank you for cocktails in the most amazingly decadent bar that Milano has to offer and for being the only other person I know who could not help but immediately make the connection between such a place and Ms Frega and what is more to then follow that thought with a silent but fervent wish that she was there to lead the charge on a) the tequila and b) the karaoke bar!

Oh and also thank you for the email on Tuesday...you do know how I like to worry.

2. I have a new apartment...move in within the next couple of weeks...according to the odd system here in CH it is a 1.5 room apartment! Must study Ikea catalogue this weekend or just take a trip with the undisputed Queen of Ikea.

3. We went to see Enrique Iglesias! No expectations. In fact we were pretty much laughing at ourselves for going, but at the end of the day (loike) it turned out to be such an incredible evening's entertainment! Thank you Petroula, Magda, Mindy, Pilar, Amit and Marcelo for such a great evening!

I should probably write separate posts on the next two....but I know once I hit publish post I will put off writing the following so here goes...

4. Lions for Lambs (Spoilers to some extent)
I went to see this on Thursday night when it opened here, I've been salivating at the trailers for quite a while now. Heavy weight cast of Redford, Streep and Cruise. All Oscar worthy actors even if the academy refuses to acknowledge one. Having recently seen The Kingdom and having been slightly disappointed in the content I was hopeful but realistic about what Lions for Lambs would deliver. During the first 15 minutes I must admit to minor confusion as at that point the irony of Cruise's character hasn't hit home yet and you could be mistaken for believing that the story he tells is the one that the movie in general wants to portray. And then things get going. No fancy tricks are used in the telling of the story. In fact, Redford providing a reality check for a promising young student by using the story of two young heroes that are at that moment fighting for their lives in Afghanistan, was as story telling techniques go kind of cheesy but that didn't matter so much to me as the story that was being told.

"We struggle through one of the worst times to be American" is what Streep's journalist character at one point comments to Cruise's would be presidential candidate. How true is that?! The world woke up on 12.09.2001 to a changed world. The world grieved with the people of the US because very single individual around the globe felt as though a part of them had also been attacked. So prominent is the US in our everyday lives that consciously or not we all grieved for 10.09.2001...grieved for the innocence that had been lost on the day in between and waited with trepidation to know just how much our world was about to change.

The only problem is that the response didn't by and large involve our neighbours, our brothers, our daughters and friends...the response to an attack on the global psyche was delivered by young men and women from the United States of America. It is their children that have been sent to right the wrong and so while we can say that Sept 11 2001 was a turning point in all our lives we have no idea what that really means.

Leaving the cinema I had one over whelming impression of what Redford and Co had wanted to portray. That there is more than one USA. There is the affluent and WASP-esque side of life that is beamed into homes around the world through the OC etc but that is just one side.

Redford's role in the movie is to narrate the story of two young minority athletic scholarship college students. Through hard graft they create opportunities for themselves that set them on the track to great grad schools etc, but it is a life they can't afford. The army seems the only way to achieve it without chalking up huge debts. They have huge plans for what they as minority former soldiers with an education can achieve once they come home. Redford's reply is "if, if....".

More than anything this movie had the surprising effect of making me want to go there. To live there. To try to even begin to understand what it is to be from there. Today it is all too easy to criticise the US; to ridicule George Bush has become, no has been, en vogue for quite some time now. Who hasn't laughed at the loud brash tourists that follow you around any sight of historical importance in Europe preaching exactly what they have read in the guidebook but as though they had a PhD in Roman archeology (ok so that was my xp in Pompeii ;)) but a ridiculously low number of US citizens have a passport. I know at one point not so long ago I heard 5%...how can we possibly judge a country and the people that make it what it is based on a sample 5% that are in no way a cross section of society?!

hmmm...I guess I have about 8 months left to think about that??