The Return

It was a good weekend. Very sociable and I had the chance to catch up with various people who I hadn’t seen for ages. I went to see the Spanish film Volver (I finally remembered its name, but was also grateful for the prompt in my comments!) last night and that was very good. If you’re into action packed blockbusters then this isn’t the film for you, but I thought it was really engaging and quite humorous, whilst also rather dark in places. I think people who know Spanish culture more would have found some of the scenes more humorous but it was possible to appreciate it anyway. The two friends I went with both have quite strong connections with the film world (that sounds way more pretentious than it is meant to) and one of them actually used to do film reviews professionally, so I won’t even attempt to aspire to such things but I’m glad I went to see it. (Volver means 'the return' by the way)

I’m hoping that now the summer is basically over that my life might get a bit more exciting. I seem to have been less sociable over the summer than I am normally, but I have been trying to arrange a few things over the next couple of weeks to be a bit more busy. *thinks* Not that the months ahead are entirely unexciting already what with going to Russia, The Gambia, moving to my own home at some point and having to get my head round the whole friend being in love with me thing at some point (it seems somewhat impolite not to work out what is going on for me on that one). Maybe my life isn’t *entirely* void of excitement.

Anyway, another week of work ahead and I haven’t actually sorted out any flights to Russia yet or visas etc so had better get on with that or I won’t be going there at all. I got a Russian guidebook out of the library on Saturday so I am going to look at that over the next few days and find out what to expect. One of my concerns was that because they have a big drinking culture there that I might cause offence by not drinking, but the guide book implied that being female means that there isn’t the same sort of pressure to drink, so it should be fine – but if the worst comes to the worst the book said that you should say that you are an alcoholic and then people will back off all embarrassed for trying to make you have the demon drink. As politely sipping vodka doesn’t strike me as a good idea, at least I have a ‘Plan B’ if all else fails. I’ll be signing up for alcoholics anonymous before you know it.