Religulous

Oh yeah... this is a great movie! I've no idea wether non-Americans ever heard of it, but I really recommend to watch it! (You know, there are ways to see it... even if the movies isn't showed in a cinema near your place)

Religulous is a kind of documentary, but very entertaining! As the name impliesl, the movie is all about religions, their believers, wrongs, human stupidity and conflicts which arise from the different beliefs. Although there is sometimes a lack of some more scientific arguments or specific points, the movie is brilliant!

Sometimes there is some resemblance with Dawkins "The God Delusion", but more entertaining and maybe a bit less clever... which in my opinion is good (as it is a movie and not a book)

This is a must for everyone who's interested in the topic of religious beliefs and their aberrations.

It's probably the best movie I've seen this year.  Click here to see the trailer.

Weekend review Part II

Saturday we finally came around to visit the Coit Tower while there wasn't any fog... The weather was awesome... it was nearly 30°C. Seeing the sunset from the top of the tower was nice, but not as breathtaking as when we saw it two weeks ago from the other side of the bay.

Afterwards we headed to (s)Nob Hill, together with Claudia and Sandro, who're also at the same school. The showed us a nice little Italian Restaurant... which gave a bit variety to the traditional American food (Mc Donalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Jack in the Box, KFC, Wendy's...) ;-)

Still not tired (we slept quite long that morning) we went to Lombard to see how it looks at nighttime. Before going home I went to Border's where I found some nice comic books (Get Fuzzy and Pearls before Swine , check it out if you've never heard of them before) 

Here some pictures:

View from the Coit Tower

Coit Tower at night, seen from the end of the crooked part of Lobard St.
(used a parked car as tripod :-D)

Weekend Review... finally! ... Part I: Friday & Quantum of bullshit

It's been a while since the last post and a lot happened during this time. No, let me reformulate this, actually there didn't happen that much, but we had quite a good time...

After hanging around with some friends Friday afternoon (Angelika was playing tennis) we went to the cinema to see the new Bond movie, Quantum of solace. I assume that you read the title, so I don't have to point out separately that it won't be my favourite film.

Let me give you some reasons:

- Bond is never ever saying "My names Bond, James Bond." during the whole movie

- he's never gambling 

- there are no gadgets!!!

- ... and no Q

- no appearence of Miss Moneypenny either

- not the old, traditional scheme with the two "Bond girls" (good and bad)

- and no exaggerated story about a man who want's to rule over the world or to start      a new world war

... and by the way, what happened with the sex scenes?

So, you see, enough reasons to be disappointed, I mean this is simply not a Bond movie. 

In addition to that, Marc Forster isn't able to make action movies... Men, it's absolutely unnecessary to shake the camera during a pursuit or just a simple action scene... You can't see anything, like in "Eagle Eye".

Sure there were some cool scenes, especially when Anatole Taubmann is talking in Swiss-German while he makes a phone call. Let me quote: "Ja Mami, s'isch scho chli heiss da...!"

(I hope I remember it properly...) We couldn't stop laughing after this, and all the people in the cinema were wondering what the heck made us do so :-)

But as I'd say this was the highlight of the movie... the rest was really disappointing. The movie might be not that bad, but it simply can't be called a "James Bond".

 PS: In the US, the movie was released just last week... 

American curiosity part II

After yesterday's post about Spam I wanna post another strange thing I discovered here... You probably know that there are a lot of fast food restaurants here in the states and that healthy food in general isn't very common everywhere... but nevertheless a lot of people try to live in a healthy way. That's the reason why you find a light version of almost every product you can think of... but I'll stop beating around the bush and post what I actuallly wanted to show you:

Uhmm... yeah, it's a bottle of water...

Veterans Day - no classes!! ^^

Hehe, we had the day off due to Veterans Day (according to Wikipedia an " annual American holiday honoring military veterans").

We used the time to buy some food and learn... (to be exact, I wanted to learn during the afternoon, but I fell asleep, so I still have to do some homwork).

To go grocery shopping in the US is each time a funny experience... Let me give you an example:

Yeah, there's nothing you can't get... they even have canned spam over here (I wonder who buys this :-p)   Nevertheless... I would prefer having Spam lite in my incoming mail instead of this common high-cal Spam. ;-)

In fact today I discovered EMMI cheese in Safeway...    but it's quite expensive, about 8$ for 0.22 lb! There's also American cheese, but usually you can't even look at it... it's mostly orange, I should post a picture once, otherwise non-Americans wont believe it.

Week(end) review - Sunday biking

Finally the weather improved a lot again (actually it was a perfect day), so we eventually got round to take our bikes out of the storage room and drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. We planned to visit Sausalito, but we realized that this would be too boring, so we headed for the Muir Woods. Unfortunately the maps we had were quite bad and so it was already too late when we learned that on the way we've taken just some trails were leading towards the woods... no chance with my nice road bike. As we're flexible we checked out the area around Point Bonita, including the beach and the lighthouse, before we headed for Sausalito.

Sausalito wasn't that interesting at all, very touristic and a lot of rip-off stores. Nevertheless our little trip was great. The lighthouse was really fascinating... the landscape and the whole scenery were breathtaking. In addition to that I had the chance to get some pictures of the GG bridge after nightfall. They may not be as good as pictures taken with a DSLR, but they're ok.

Point Bonita Lighthouse

No need to explain... (hopefully) *click on it*

The IMAX experience - part II

"I like to move it move it!" - Oh yeah... Madagascar Escape 2 Africa came to the cinemas last Friday... On Saturday we went to the IMAX to see it. The animation of the movie is breathtaking... absolutely fantastic! Of course in the IMAX it's even better than anywhere else, but I'm sure you won't be disappointed when you see it in a normal cinema :-p

Some parts of the movie are simply hilarious, especially the penguins... but also the monkeys and the lemurs of course, but I don't wanna spoil anything.

Not every single scene might be funny, but nevertheless it's a movie I really recommend to see (best in the IMAX, hehehe).