Back to Bratislava - Airplane Reviews

The day began with a 5am wakeup call in a hotel room in Penang and ended with an 11pm arrival at our flat in Bratislava. In between, the trip included stopovers in Kuala Lumpur and Dubai. It was a long day. As much I travel, there is no getting used to it. The days just seem longer every time I do it.

I read through Time's 100 Most Influential people, which wasn't bad. Maybe one day I'll be influential.

I also read some more of the book I'm reading, Traffic, which is un-ironically, about traffic and why we drive the way we do. It's about as boring as it sounds, but I'm forcing myself to get through it.

I ate lunch and dinner on two different Emirates flights. Both were chicken dishes with vegetables, and neither was bad. I still say Emirates has the best food of any airline on which I've been. The dessert on the first one was chocolate cake that they, for some unknown reason, ruined by slapping an apricot on top of it. The chocolate dessert on the second one wasn't bad. It was the same chocolate cake as the first flight (sans the apricot) but was surrounded with kind of a mousse cream. I read something recently that said the best way to fight jet lag is to fast when traveling. I've thought about this, but I have to eat when I'm hungry. However, I've stopped letting the airlines dictate when I should eat since they are serving trays of food constantly. I only eat the meal if I'm hungry. Otherwise, I take a pass.

As for entertainment, I finished two movies that I previously had fell asleep during on previous flights and watched one in full.

TRUE GRIT
I only had a little bit left to watch on this one. I fell asleep watching it on my trip from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur. I've been wanting to see it as I generally enjoy the movies the Coen Brothers put out. I sense it was nominated for an Oscar purely because it was tagged as "Directed by the Joel and Ethan Coen." The movie was fine, but there wasn't anything particularly memorable. It was a well made Western film. The actress who played the girl was pretty good.

FAIR GAME
I cannot remember when I started this one, but I had seen a good chunk of it on some other flight at some point. What's funny (and not the best endorsement for the film) is that I fell asleep again watching it today on my 2nd flight and had to pick it up again on the third. This is less about the movie and more about that I'm rarely on a plane now when I'm not totally exhausted and badly in need of sleep. This film stars Sean Penn and Naomi Watts and tells the "true" story of CIA operative Valerie Plame, who was outed and made a scapegoat by President Bush's administration in an effort to distract the general population and the media from the fact that they weren't finding WMD's in Iraq, and her husband, Joe Wilson. The story was extremely one sided and extremely slanted to the left, which makes sense because it was based on the books by Wilson and Plame, and because Sean Penn was in it. Overall, I enjoyed it, but I prefer movies that are accounts of true stories to be a little less biased and attempt to paint the whole picture so that the audience can decide what they think. I don't like being told what to think.

RED
This one I watched from beginning to end. It came out last year and stars Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and some other old people. They are retired CIA agents who have become targets to be killed. It was fun, entertaining, and relatively well written. All the characters are likeable and the pace of the story was great. The 2 hours flew by, which is exactly what you want when watching a movie on a long flight. It was a perfect movie for airplane viewing.

That's all for now from the airplane seat. There will be more to come in June, which looks like it'll be my next trip to the US.