Saturday, 9 December 2006
06:00 GMT, Somewhere Over North America
| W |
A lot has gone on since my last update. I guess the one really major thing is that I graduated school back at the end of October. I've been to all the screenings at my school since I started and I really, truly, honestly believe that my class turned out the best screening of them all. Perhaps our greatest advantage was the two feature films that members of my class crewed on... We were the first, and so far only LA Film School class to ever have such an opportunity. I think the rigors of doing 6 weeks straight of production at a pretty darned near-professional level gave us a level of discipline and appreciation for teamwork and proper planning that maybe most of the previous graduating classes before us didn't get.
I think for the most part we tried to apply that level of discipline and planning to our thesis projects, and I think that it showed. It didn't hurt that we had a number of pretty dang decent scripts. Maybe every film school class thinks this, but I definitely feel that you may see some of us working together for a long time to come, maybe on some things that might even make it to your TV screen or local movie theater.
I've put together a page with a good number of my film school projects on it so check 'em out if you are interested!
And now on to a different subject... a couple of weeks ago I was watching Veronica Mars and noticed that one of the scenes took place in the exact same lecture hall at UCSD where I had shot my light saber video Return of the BryBry some 8 or 9 years ago!!
So yeah, a couple of weeks ago they announced that a small group of people from my church were going to go visit the church in Dushanbe (the same church that took our previous group into Afghanistan last year)... ever since my trip last year, I haven't stopped thinking about going back, and well, here I am, on this plane with broken air conditioning (it's freakin' hot in here right now), and a broken entertainment system (no video displays, no audio either!) on a thirteen-hour transcontinental flight. Wooo hoo.
But I've suffered through much worse... I'll survive. Although one thing that kind of sucks is the timing of the flight... we left LAX at around 6PM local time, and we're basically chasing the night halfway around the globe to land in Moscow the next day at 6PM local time... so I'm basically going to experience 24 straight hours of night time! Anyway. I don't have much else to say now, I'm sure there'll be more to report later. So I will sign off for now and maybe attempt to sleep.
Saturday, 9 December 2006
13:35 GMT, Somewhere over Scandinavia
That was kind of odd. This was the shortest Saturday I can remember. About two hours ago I saw the sun come up. Now it's already setting.
Wednesday, 13 December 2006
09:00, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Well I've been here a few days but I've been so busy I haven't had time to update anything. So for now I'll just put up some pictures with some captions and I'll have to come back later to fill in the details when I have some time... which may turn out to not be until I get back, haha. Also, sdue to extremely limited bandwidth here, for now I'm just going to upload the small versions of these photos.
I ran into my dad in Moscow and had dinner with him. The next morning I left for Dushanbe, he took off to Kiev.
Inside the bathroom of the Tupelev TU-154 we flew on to Dushanbe.
The mountains of Tajikistan as seen from the plane on the way in. A good portion of the country looks like this.
It's pretty cold here, but Daniel who is notoriously never cold... is never cold.
This is Angela. She took a semester off from Johns Hopkins to come here to teach English for three months.
We visited an orphanage that is run by the mission center here. These kids have nothing. They only get electricity for 2 hours a day here, and amazingly, there were no toys in sight. Toys are a luxury and there just isn't enough money to go around for such luxuries.
We returned the next day (although this pic is from the same day) and brought a bunch of warm clothes, toys and some candy for the kids. Amazingly the pastor here told us that we were the only group to ever visit the orphanage to return during the same trip, let alone buy stuff for the kids.
This is some ancient castle. Apparently the walls were built to protect (ie. guard) a natural spring inside of it.
The electrical power here is pretty inconsistent. Sometimes the power goes out unexpectedly. Othertimes there are scheduled shortages. All I know is that it gets pretty cold at night without power when all the heat is run on electrical power!
For the last 10 years they've been feeding hot meals to the homeless,
we came to help out for a bit.
There are so many amazing programs going on here that I didn't know about before even though this is also the same church that I went with into Afghanistan last year on the medical missions trip... but we hardly spent any time here at the home church in Dushanbe because we basically just stopped here on the way to and from Afghanistan. It's been an amazing experience learning about all the things they are doing there to help the people in the community. They are teaching classes in English, business, computing, and all kinds of other things to help the people in the area gain whatever advantages they can...
There's so much more I'd like to talk about but for now this will have to do.
Thursday, 14 December 2006
11:42, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
Yesterday we were taken up into the mountains surrounding Dushanbe, basically on a pleasure cruise. Having lived in Southern California all my life I guess I never pictured myself ever being in any place as remote as this.
This definitely ain't your Orange County soccer mom SUV action! Although I was surprised at how far up these icy and treacherous roads I saw Ladas and Daewoos driving up (though after a certain point more of them were being PUSHED up than driven, haha)
At the top of this particular mountain is a natural hot spring. Inside this house is a steamroom that uses the heat from these natural springs and let me tell you, it was way, way hotter than any sauna I've ever been in America. The water from this spring is known for its healing powers. We ran into a Russian guy who came all the way from Kamchatka (way on the east coast of Russia) there so I guess it must be pretty famous!
Well, pretty much the same deal as yesterday, just these captions. Hopefully when I get home I will have time to write detailed accounts but again, for now this will have to do. Tonight we are taking the red-eye out of Dushanbe back to Moscow. Then we are shuttling over from one airport to another to catch our flight back to LAX. It's going to be a very, very, very, long day!!