After breaking my English boycott due to the stress of finding an apartment when, in less than 2 weeks, 2 people I had plans with to live with told me it wasn't going to work after all after which I had no luck finding an apartment because no one returned my calls or emails except for one person who interrogated me, I am back in my hometown, having settled for a dorm room this year, and am once again not speaking English. But my family seems to have forgotten, since I would not be speaking English with them anyway.

My mom and I had a movie-filled day. We first watched a German movie that I had never seen, which took place half in Germany and half in Japan. When the main character goes to Japan, I was for some reason thinking that that half of the movie would be in Japanese, but there ended up being a lot of English in that movie, because every time a German person talked to a Japanese person in the movie, they spoke English. Not that it was a bad thing, it simply reminded me of how many times I made friends in Germany whose native language wasn't German either and how often we misunderstood eachother because we were speaking something that wasn't a native language to either of us. But once again, while watching this movie, I wondered why English is always the default language that people are most likely to know, no matter where they are (though that's not entirely true. I have heard from several friends who have had experiences in countries in which people don't speak English at all). I barely speak Japanese, but even a little bit is enough to know that it's much easier than English. And so is German, for that matter, for entirely different reasons.

My mom and I then went to an Iranian film festival. We watched 5 films, 4 of which were 10 minutes or shorter (The fifth one, unfortunately, was 50 minutes long and was so boring that I pretty much spaced out. It wasn't about anything at all and wasn't at all entertaining). My favorite of the movies was called Diplomacy, and was about 10 minutes long, about 2 government people, one from Iran and one from the US (the latter of whom was played by the lady who was MaryAnn in True Blood and Admiral Cain in Battlestar Galactica (and it was surprising to see an actual famous professional actress in any of these films)), and their interpreters who start manipulating the conversation. They are doing so at first only to change things that could be offensive, but then get carried away and start completely changing what the government people are saying. It was really funny, and I thought the general idea was very clever.

Without further ado, a random part of the film.