Day 50 of 98 – Travel by Train

This is the first time I’ve left Berlin since I arrived (Day 10). This makes forty days I’ve stayed in one place that is not Ottawa. This breaks my previous record of twenty-two days when I was in London in Dec 1997/Jan 1998. That was an awesome trip. Here is what I remember about that one:

Titanic (the movie not the ship) was supposed to come out in July 1997 but it was not ready so they moved back the release date to Friday December 19. I’m a huge James Cameron fan and at the time he was five for five: Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies. My flight to London was on Thursday December 18 – I was going to have to wait an eternity (three weeks) to see it as it was not being released in the UK until the new year. This was causing me some anxiety.

So by some miracle (I forget how) I managed to score a pass to the premiere on Wednesday December 16. I was out of the country when it was officially released so I missed all the initial hoopla. I’m pretty into movies, and as much as liked the film I was shocked when I got back home to hear that it was destroying all the box office records. One of the guys I worked with took his family three times to see it and each time it was sold out. *

Also being released on December 19 of that same year was the new James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies. As much as it sucked I remember thinking it was cool that I got to see it at the massive Odeon theatre in Leicester Square in London. Again I was lucky because they had released it a week earlier in the UK.

Holy crap, has this blog been reduced to me talking about movies from 15 years ago?

Was it ever anything more?

Nope.

My current trip presents a similar first world problem because The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is going to be released the day *before* I return to Canada. This will break my streak of seeing David Fincher’s movies on opening night.

But strangely enough during my 50 days overseas I’ve only watched one episode of the Daily Show (English) and two South Parks (in German for practice) and I have not even gone to the cinema. If I can make it until Dec 23 this might be another record: 15 weeks with no movies.

Thank being said, if that fighting robot movie is playing in Berlin I might try and go see that with my dad. We’re both huge fans of robot-on-robot violence. And I like going to to the cinema in foreign countries. It’s the same as home but just a little bit different. For example, in Germany one can get beer at the concession stand. In Canada that is verboten. In Europe there’s a lot more nudity in the previews – even the ones showing before family movies. Note for those of you searching for the root cause of the European financial crisis: you need look no further.

Anyway, back to 97/98. January 1998 was the year of the big ice storm in Ottawa-Montreal. I remember watching CNN in London and seeing all the reporting about my hometown. There was much talk of power outages, work stoppages, looting, and cannibalism but when I got back home the power had not even blipped at my house. I know this because my VCR** had successfully recorded all my shows (X-Files and Simpson’s).

* Note for all you haters out there – the movie had not yet been released, and in my opinion Cameron made it six for six – the love story was cheesy but I found everything else about Titanic just great.
** A VCR is a PVR from the 80s and 90s.