Concluding a busy weekend of movie-watching, house cleaning, house hunting, and spending time with a visitor from New York, by way of Hong Kong.

I met Aaron in early 2001, when I took a trip to New York with Stephanie to visit her friends Keith and Claude, as well as to meet up with her friend Monica who was visiting from Australia.  Aaron is one of Keith’s friends and on an afternoon when we all met at Danal for brunch, while everyone was chatting in Cantonese, Aaron was the only one who wasn’t conversing in Cantonese.  Not that I need to be catered to; I’m perfectly fine not understanding the conversation.  Still, it was a considerate gesture.  To top it off, he was also really interesting to talk with.

Some time later when Keith and Aaron visited San Francisco, I learned about Xanga from Aaron and about six months later, started this blog.  So he deserves credit as the man who started it all.

Thursday evening I picked Aaron up at Suvarnabhumi and then he, Tawn and I had dinner at the Joe Louis Puppet Theatre restaurant at the Lumpini Night Bazaar.  Frankly, the food was okay and a bit overpriced.  But the company was good.

On Friday, we went to Bangkhonthiinai to teach.  An extra class this week, arranged because Aaron wouldn’t be in town on Wednesday but really wanted to go to the school.  He proved to be a most excellent teacher and the children took to him quickly, perhaps a bit frustrated that he wouldn’t speak any Thai with them, though.  “Speak English,” he would say in response to their questions.

One of the major exercises was to practice constructing sentences using the words, “who,” “where,” “when,” “how,” and “what.”  It is interesting how some students picked up on this really quickly while some of the students couldn’t grasp the pattern of using the article “the” in front of the nouns.  “Where is the apple?  The apple is on the table.”  Thai doesn’t have articles.

Top left: Aaron and a fourth grader practice making questions with plastic fruits.  Top right: Students practice introducing themselves to Aaron.  Lower picture: After class, Aaron poses with his new posse.  Notice that one of the girls didn’t want her picture taken and hid behind Aaron despite efforts to get her to stand to one side or another.

Friday evening, Tawn and I went to watch “Dreamgirls” at the new Esplanade Cineplex.  The showtime was in one of their luxury theatres with tickets running a horrendously steep 500 baht each, compared to 140 for regular tickets.  The cinema, which normally would seat about 180, instead had 32 recliners arranged in pairs.  Each pair had a privacy wall around them so you couldn’t see any of the other pairs.  Recline was about 160 degrees and included a cushy blanket and pillow.

Even more over-the-top, when you arrived at the cinema you waited in a small lounge outside.  The waiter approached your chair on his knees and took your order: complimentary tea or coffee with cookies, as well as all the traditional movie snacks.  Our tea and cookies were delivered by a waiter who was again on his knees.  This is the way royalty is served in Thailand, literally.  Way over-the-top.

Anyhow, the movie was quite good.  Jennifer Hudson (on the far right in the picture to the right), playing the role of Effie, has a dynamic voice and really stole the show.  The production design was also very good.  We had seen the show in the Bay Area and were interested to see how well it translated to film.  Dreamgirls is the latest in a stream of movie musicals over the past few years, stretching back to “Evita” in 1996 and including films such as “Chicago,” “Moulin Rouge,” “Delovely,” “Phantom of the Opera,” and “Rent.”

I’ve always felt that film is a medium very well suited to musicals and am buoyed by the apparent revival of the movie musical.

Saturday evening we took in a second movie, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s brilliant “Babel,” written by Guillermo Arriaga with whom he also collaborated on 2003’s “21 Grams.”  The complex narrative is a web of four interconnected stories that center around the dueling themes of the power of familial love and the inability to communicate, between cultures, within families, and even with ourselves.

What works so effectively is that the four story lines are not told in a synchronous time line.  In an early scene we witness a telephone conversation between a maid and her employer, who is thousands of miles away in Morocco.  It is only near the end of the film that we witness that same conversation from the employer’s side. 

Realizing that most of you have seen this movie already, since Thailand is the last place on the planet to get films, I’ll say that I thought there were two masterful scenes in the film.  The first was the one at the end of the film (left) where Brad Pitt’s pit character calls from the hospital and speaks with his young son, trying to silence a relieved sob while he son tells him about the mundane affairs of elementary school. 

The second was the scene (right) in which Rinko Kikuchi’s deaf-mute teenage girl goes to a nightclub with her friends and a friend’s cousin on whom she has a crush.  A little stoned and a little drunk, she is at first infatuated and intoxicated with the moment and then crashes when she sees her friend making out with another guy.  All of her feelings of loneliness, isolation and being unloved come rushing over her.  Suddenly, the pulsing lights and motion, which had seemed so liberating, cause claustrophobia.

The most effective part of that scene is that the director alternates between having audio – when we see the scene from a third person’s perspective – and having a nearly-muted audio track when we see things from the girl’s perspective.  It is very powerful and Kikuchi’s acting is stellar.  Hopefully she wins the Academy Award for which she is nominated.

Sunday afternoon we met up with Aaron one final time for lunch at Crepes and Co on Sukhumvit 12.  Had a very nice visit and took this picture in the garden before heading home.  It was really nice to spend more time with Aaron and hopefully he will visit again soon.

After lunch we were in a bit of a rush to get home and meet up with Khun Yo, our real estate agent.  I’ll have to talk more about the process of house hunting in future posts, since the process is a bit different in Thailand. 

We saw four places today, one located on Sukhumvit 53 (one soi over from Thong Lor) that is really nice and reminds me a lot of the apartment I lived in on Eureka Street in San Francisco.  It is 70 square meters, 2 bedroom / 1 bath (although the second bedroom is pretty small), has nice light and a compact but efficient kitchen.  5.4 million baht is the asking price.  US$155,000.

A little more than we were hoping to spend.