It was nice, when I got off the train in Warsaw, to be able to walk around like I knew where I was going. And actually know where I was going... I stopped off first at the KFC for dinner (I was curious) and then found Wallace and Grommit – I mean, my hotel. (I also discovered that it did have a sign after all, but one that was only visible at night when it was lit up.)
The hotel was interesting. I'd stay there again (location, location, location) but the interiors of the rooms had some questionable aesthetics. Lots of brown... I felt like I'd stepped into someone's den sometime in the 1970s...
The room included breakfast, which was an elaborate buffet: cold cuts, all sorts of cheeses, hard boiled eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, cereals, fruit, coffee cake, breads with butter and jams, sausage and some other hot meats, juice, tea, coffee... Sadly I only had about 20 minutes to enjoy it.
The room also had a TV, which I stayed up too late watching. There was a great musical cabaret show in a Polish channel, which featured a string quartet that performed Canadian Brass-style (classical musical training, expressed with a sense of humor). Then I watched a bit of Mad About You dubbed in German. Sorry to say, there's a vast difference between Paul Reiser saying in his sarcastic New York accent, "Excuse me?" and a dubbed Germanic voice instead saying, "Entschuldigung?" Still, this was better than the German sitcom that seemed to be one long stupid joke about the husband failing to have an erection. Meanwhile, on BBC World, the sky was still falling. OK, I know there are bad things in the world and it's good that someone tells us about them, but, still, the BBC was a bit much. The happiest segment I saw them show during the whole two days I watched was on advances in artificial limbs, which is only a happy subject if you don't stop to consider why people actually need artificial limbs.
Then another Polish channel had a movie that was mostly in Polish but subtitled in English. It wasn't very good. It was one of those morose European flicks full of melodramatic silences and a darkened city full of no one but the movie's sinister people. (I wonder, though, if this is not because European filmmakers can't afford the extras needed to make a place look populated?) I've seen French films like this too, though they usually include some gloomy dialog where the protagonist waif explains how her parents had both killed themselves and that's why she's throwing herself into the clutches of an emotionally-scarred man three times her age. Or at least the one I saw in Suwalki was like this...
Anyway, in the Polish movie at one point one bad guy suddenly starts speaking to the other bad guy in English. I'm not sure why; they seemed to both be Polish. Maybe they thought it sounded tougher? They thought wrong. The older one, his accent was ok, but his pacing was off. Perhaps he couldn't really speak English and he learned his lines phonetically, which would explain the erratic diction. I wouldn't make fun of someone's language limitations, but I think it's perfectly legitimate to criticize the filmmaker who wrote his dreadful dialog and directed the performance. The "sit your ass down!" demand was delivered so out of sync from the way any English-speaking heavy would have said it that I was surprised the other bad guy didn't start giggling. (I did.) Then he punctuated his threat with, "Dig it?" I get the sense that the filmmaker perhaps once stayed in my hotel and got confused about what decade it was... "Capiche?" would have been much more contextually appropriate, but I guess then he wouldn't really be speaking English. And then how could the other bad guy take him seriously?
Posted 10/18, written 10/16.