A Business Trip to Denmark

Got upgraded from San Francisco to Frankfurt: My first First Class experience.  Indeed more convenient!!

I have been traveling by care and plane and train for almost 22 hours now with very little time on the ground. When I stand up I feel like I am still moving actually.  But finally I am in Odense, Denmark.  We met with two other colleagues for a quick and rather bland dinner at a cafe 30 feet from the hotel.  There is mist in the air which is a fine experience after many rains back home lately.

My body is really tired but my brain doesn't want to shut down.  I had to work some too after dinner but thankfully it was a fruitful experience although made me even more alert.

I got to watch a movie and another half a movie in the first leg of my travel.  I jot down some quick notes in the plane about them.

Hope Springs (2012)
Meryl Streep was as lovely as ever and had a nice performance and like always, reminded me of my dear G.K.
While watching, however, I found tears in my eyes. After 10 minutes into the movie I was asking myself why I was watching this. It was about an unhappy dull marriage of 31 years. The couple were used to routines of a bland life and even had separated bedrooms. They were essentially sharing a house but not a life.  But the lady, the old woman in the movie, she wanted a "marriage"; she wanted to be kissed. She wanted to make love and feel wanted. She loved her husband but all that dullness had made her wonder about the vows.
She wanted a new marriage. She decided to give it a last shot and enrolled in "an intense marriage counseling" in a remote town in Main that cost her $4000 of her savings.

At one session in the counseling when she was not accompanied by her husband she said she was lonely but she was not sure if she would feel the same if she was alone.

Granted, at one odd moment towards the end of the movie among the wife's disappointments the husband realized how he was losing her, finally! And things got happy again.

Again. They were happy at first it seemed. They wanted each other.  But they had lost it in the process.

That is the odd irony that made me cry I guess.

Liberal Arts (2012)

Didn't get to watch it through and now it feels like a lingering thought thinking about it.

A 35 year old guy living a dull life in New York is summoned back to his alpha mater college in Ohio to the retirement party of his favorite prof. It was funny how the movie "showed" his feeling about being back to a place he used to dream anything was possible as a college boy. A college girl he meets is talkative and spontaneous. She is talking about a class she took last year "that changed her life". Yeah! I remember those days. Those that lives could be changed; those days bloated with possibilities.

All the ideas in the young minds. All the idealism.

I miss that!

Not that my college years at IUT were anywhere close to the liberty of this college in Ohio. Far from it on the outside. Note also that I was studying engineering and these are liberal arts students with art and novels and music. Yet, we had lots of fresh ideas too, and sky was the limit when I was in college as well. We had books that changed our lives and music that motivated us to be creative.

 Music indeed changes ones perspective of the same thing.

There was Phantom ad on a bus in one scene in New York.  And the dude found the he loved opera.

To be continued after/if I watched the whole movie.

And the bell rang 12 times.  I better try to get some shut eyes even if not shut brain. Godnat as they would say in Denmark.