Cultural Activities

I had a very cultural week last week.  On Wednesday, I went to see the Vietnam Youth Orchestra perform at the National Opera House. It's probably not something I would normally do, but some friends were going and I decided to tag along.  The entire orchestra was very good, although some of them didn't seem very young...a few of the men were clearly balding so I'm not sure what their definition of "youth symphony" is. There was a 13 year-old girl who was particularly good; she was so full of expression and movement even though she was sitting at the piano.

                                    Hanoi Opera House

                      adorable 13 year-old pianist; she was amazing!

On Friday, Camille, Sandrine, Bich and I went to this live art event at the Centre Culturel Francais. I'm kicking myself for not taking pictures; I really, really wish I could show you photographic/video evidence of what happened. Basically, a guy painted three almost-naked models with his bare hands and then they danced around. The "music" was this really weird guy making nonsense noise into a microphone...he sounded like a cross between a dying cat and a goblin.  Stuff like that is way beyond my artistic appreciation. The body painting was cool to see, but my favorite part of the event was definitely the free open bar - unlimited mojitos and wine!

Saturday three of us went back to the Centre for the movie festival.  They are showing lots of free movies the entire month - mostly French movies, but also some Vietnamese movies with French subtitles. We watched three movies in a row.  The only movie I liked was the last one which dealt with African immigrants in Paris.  The second movie, a kids' movie about horses, was so ridiculous it was hilarious. There were a lot of sad parts, and whenever there was a scene where a human might typically cry the camera would zoom in on the horse's eye and just stay there an inappropriately long time, as if the horse was really going to cry. Yeah, right.  But I guess a lot of the kids bought it because I could hear a lot of them crying or talking back at the movie screen (i.e. "oh nooo!" or "the poor little horsie is so sad").  I was mainly happy that I understood just about everything in all three movies since they were all in French.

Overall, I felt I had a very cultural week(end) and now I can go back to my normal non-artistic, non-cultural activities like drinking with friends and watching episodes of NCIS online.

On an unrelated note, I had really good pizza and cheesecake this weekend - two things I'd been craving for weeks, so that was great as well.