Spotting Omar and Bessie

Last night, I saw Omar Sharif in Monsieur Ibrahim. Omar Sharif seems to pop up in the most random places, but it's always a nice surprise. The last time I saw him was in the IMAX show at the Philadelphia King Tut exhibit, where he was the narrator telling the history of the King Tut discovery to his fake niece as if it were a nice bedtime story. Random!

The movie was very good, and I wouldn't mind watching it a few more times in order to listen to M. Ibrahim's sage life aphorisms. It's about the Koran and about an old man's need to leave his legacy, which he does by spoiling a 16 year old boy with goods, both of the tangible and the intangible sort. They end up going on a roadtrip to Turkey. Roadtrips are something every human being should do at least once in their lifetime. In the end, the boy, grown up now, becomes the owner of M. Ibrahim's convenience store. A boy walks in and steals stuff, just as he did so many years ago, and so he too gets the opportunity to take M. Ibrahim's place and pass on the knowledge of the Koran.

Aaron said he thought the ending was too contrived, though he loved the movie, and I agreed with him. Later though, under the influence of the bubbly no doubt, I realized that it- the ending that was really a return to the beginning- might be yet another parallel to the Islam faith; Muslims believe that the nature of life is cyclic. It doesn't make the ending any less contrived, but at least I understand why the director might have ended it that way. One of my favorite parts was when the boy Momo gave the prostitute his teddy bear.

Also, I took a mini-mini roadtrip to Olympia with the people I met through the French club (who are turning out to be so so awesome!) and had the best weekend ever in the middle of nowhere. As we were nearing our destination, we spotted a real, live brown & white cow hangin' out on the side of the road.

"Cow!" cried out Tom excitedly. Only, when a Frenchman says it, "cow" sounds a lot like "car". And cars, frankly, are not that interesting or uncommon, despite the fact that we were in Olympia. So Aaron and I were like "Uh, calm down Frenchman, it's just a car. They must have those in France too, dude."

So that's how we nearly missed our first cow-on-the-road sighting, but luckily, we saw it in time, and then Aaron and I were the ones yelling "cow!" and pointing and gawking at it like stupid city folk. Seeing cows on the roadside is somehow that much more exciting than seeing them grazing on the grass. Seriously though, it was like, we could have reached out of our window and touched it!