Lights, Camera, Action

Today we got to go to the Munich Film School to meet some students, view some films and tour their school. I wasn't really sure what to expect as far as the quality of the work, but the films were amazing. The one that really stood out was "Milan," a film about the bomb raids from NATO in Siberia. The film was suspenseful and intriguing with twist and turns. It is German with English subtitles and if you ever get a chance to see the 22 minute short film, take it! Others films included a language film with people from different cultures making animal noises and a funny short film about a man trying to get his passport renewed the day of his flight because it expired, only to find he didn't need one to go to Turkey.

After viewing the films, we toured the school seeing some of the editing rooms, sounds mixing studio, small and large filming studios and library with more than 3,000 DVDs and VHS tapes. The work produced from these students was superior and reviled many things seen in theatres today. The film "Weeping Camel" created from a student at the school, has shown in more than 100 countries. This school is different from our universities in the fact that students go for more than four years. The woman who spoke with us today has been a student since 1995. The students have various area of study, like documentary, fiction and production and they have assignments including 4 films. The school gives them different requirements for each film and different budgets. The school has an interesting application process and only about 30-50 students from 800-1000 are excepted each year.

Returning to the hotel, we headed out to shop. Some of the close are very similar to the US, but there is a lot more color and patterns. Some shops were great while others had our hopes up with clothes in the window that lead to disappointment with the rest of the store. A little sick of German food, tonight we had Italian at a cute restaurant off the plaza followed by ice cream.

There are some funny things we have encountered here, for instance if you buy french fries at Burger King, you have the BUY ketchup to go with them. Menus are very hard to understand and they use terms differently from what we have. Someone ordered Bavarian Meatloaf and got something that was a mix between Bologna and spam. One menu even had pictures but the food items didn't match what the pictures looked like.

Fashion here is different too. We have seen some really neat trends and also some "do nots" in the style department. Mullets are the big surprise and tons of people have them. They are very popular, but NOT in style! They mix a lot of colors, some that match and others that do not. We meet one man walking around with a mouse nose and another man was doing magic tricks dressed as a demon person. Today we even saw a woman with knee highs and capris. Yikes. They also like various hair colors, including red, pink and blue. It is not uncommon to see two hair colors and even two hair styles (you can cut one half of the head with one style and the other half the other style).