This year I mostly focused on old favorites (Thailand and Scandinavia) and the two countries I was visiting (Norway and Spain), so I was not as widely read as last year. But I did get a taste of quite a few countries ( Read more... )

A friend had free tickets to "Zootopia," not to be confused with "Zoolander II," so I got to see it early. I recommend it ( Read more... )

And here is my last post in this series this year.

France

Fiction

* Champion, Alexander. The Grave Gourmet (2010) - The author is not afraid of big words (First sentence: "With the consummate petulance endemic to opera divas and French chefs..."). And I hadn't even heard of the word "piaffing" (executing a cadenced trot on one spot, with a ( Read more... )

Australia

Once when my best friend from high school and I were bored over the summer, we made up lessons for each other. One of the things we taught ourselves about was Australia. It seemed all very alien to me. Southern hemisphere, so much desert, aborigines. But now I think my Anglophilia may extend to Australia.

Movie* "Muriel's Wedding" ( ( Read more... )

(I'm not including books I've read that are about the US.)

Argentina

So Argentina turns out to be less alien to me than I expected.

Movies* “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” - Young man (Antonio Banderas) escapes mental hospital with help of nurse lover to seek gal he really loves. She barely remembers him, so he kidnaps her with the plan to teach her ( Read more... )

My Spanish teacher and then one of my classmates recommended the movie "Valentín".

It's set in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1960s. And it's about a boy who lives with his grandmother and dreams of becoming an astronaut, in spite of his bad vision, cross-eyes, and Argentinian citizenship. (Why, yes, that was foreshadowing in my last post.) And ( Read more... )

Apparently market research (or at least the guts of marketers) shows that Black Widow toys won't sell well, even if she's on a motorcycle that comes out of a plane (my source: Daily Dot). Toy replicas of the plane and motorcycle are still being sold (because: duh!), but Hasbro's is ridden by Captain America and Mattel's by Iron Man ( Read more... )

I was just telling someone that our only discount theatre was in Round Rock. Wrong! There's also Southwest Theaters, which I learned about from Austinite Tips.

In spite of the name, it's in far northwest Austin and there's only one location: the old Lake Creek Alamo ( Read more... )

All the cool kids are doing it (hi Tam and Laurie), and so I had to. Okay, my surgery is only a gum graft. For a single tooth ( Read more... )

I've heard of people who want to visit the highest peak of each state. (And some who would be happy visiting only the highest peak in every state in the continental US so they can get out of dealing with Alaska I presume.) And I used to read the blog of a guy who decided to travel to every single country.

The GoalI like traveling but I don't ( Read more... )