BEWARE OF DOG! 內有惡犬!

A Fairy-tale Like City

In the fairy tale, Jack climbed the beanstalk up to the castle in the cloud and later saw the giant; similarly, I flew thousands of miles from Taiwan to Amsterdam and when I arrived in the city I saw the giant too, the difference was I also saw his brothers, sisters, uncles and aunties.  The pedestrians on the sidewalks were all so tall that it made me wonder if the compressed air pressure in the airplane had somewhat shrunken me to a mini-sized human being.  Seeing a lot of giants riding on bicycles gave me a delusion that I had blended into a scene of an Andersen's fairy tale.  To prove I was not dreaming, I googled "country has the tallest population" and my doubt was cleared.  Yes, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world with men's average height at 185 cm and women's 171.  The view in this city is so bizarre—people commute mainly by bicycle; cars are very limited in the streets—it is nowhere to be found in the world's capitals.  The Group of Eight countries had just pledged at the summit in Japan to halve the world emission by 2050.  If all the big cities in the world were like Amsterdam, the emission would have been reduced by more than a half.  Netherlands should be rewarded a medal as the greenest country in the world.

The Dark Side of Paris

For an Asian, the first trip to Paris is an experience of shocked-and-awed.  The magnificence of the ancient buildings towering at every corner and alongside the Seine River makes an Oriental ashamed of his hometown's mostly modern but dull constructions.  However, hiding behind the glitter and glamour of this great city, there exists the dark side which the tourists are too busy taking photos to notice and the hustling Parisians have gotten numb with:  The streets are dirty with garbage scattered everywhere, and I am not talking about the outskirts but the very center of the downtown Pairs.  Scooters surely are convenient in the jam-packed streets and avenues, but disordered parking is a killer to the beauty of the city landscape.  Beggars and homeless wanderers are commonly seen sitting or sleeping on the sidewalks.  Crime rate is high; tourists are warned to keep their bags in their font to protect from robbers and pickpockets—not a paradise for backpackers.

French Services Suck

One thing I could not tolerate about the French is their barbarian (I can say that again) customer services.  The consumers in Japan and Taiwan are the happiest in the world as they are always very well attended.  In Japan , the second you step in a store, any store, you are greeted by a loud “elaishei,” your requests are always quickly responded, and when you walk out of the store you hear a loud “arigatou gozaimasu” again.  Taiwan is catching up with Japan, in some restaurants the service quality has even been pushed to the limit, if you have been to 鼎王麻辣鍋, you know what I mean.  In Paris, the attendants' attitude is so rude they seem to imply that your coming to spend money in their store is a serious offense to them, and you'll have an impulse to apologize for that.  If you can hear “bienvenue” or “remercier,” go buy a lottery ticket immediately because today is your lucky day.

France is a proud country; the French are famous for their hatred of English as the global language.  Sitting in a café, the better your English is, chances are the worse you will be treated by the waiters.  This is absurd.  In Chinese moral, if you are helped by a person for a certain thing, you should be thankful and think of doing something good in return to honor this person’s kindness.  Didn't the USA and the UK save France from Hitler’s rule in World War II?  Hadn’t it for these two English-speaking countries, the French would have been forced to speak German by now.  Shouldn’t they be grateful for that and welcome English?

A Town Freezes in Time

The bells on the belfry of Bruges, Belgium, have been ringing regularly for almost one millennium.  The ding-dong is pleasant to the ear now as it was in 1240 when the belfry was built.  For centuries, these bells had served as a medium connecting the hearts of the villagers; now, they ring to please the hearts of the tourists.  Either way they help benefit this beautiful and romantic town.  Owing to the famous novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame which is translated into 鐘樓怪人 (The Peculiar Man in the Belfry) in Chinese, almost immediately after seeing this tower, every tourist from Taiwan come up with the joke "I wonder if there is a peculiar man living there (裡面不知道有沒有住著鐘樓怪人)?"

江山如此多嬌，引無數英雄競折腰 (The land is as attractive as a beauty, making countless heroes devote their lives to pursuing it).  This Chinese verse adequately depicts the inspiration that drove so many war heroes in history into battle after battle.  A few became kings or emperors, most of them died in the battlefield with their corpses and dreams decomposed in the middle of nowhere.   When Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French Empire, France was the most powerful country in the world with its territory covering most part of Europe.  It was the most glorious days for the French.  No wonder France still worships him as a god.  When it comes to a battle, there is no such thing as “a win-win situation,” the winner takes it all.  After the Battle of Waterloo, the winner became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the loser ended up exiled to a remote tiny island and died there.

Friendly Germans

I guess we all have somehow learned the differences between the characters of French and German people.  It is said the French are romantic and casual while doing serious things, while the German are always uptight and methodic.  I have a few contacts with both, and my feeling about the nationalities of these two countries is quite the other way around.  Maybe it is the historic atmosphere of Paris, or maybe it is the colorful story of Napoleon, that gives the foreigners the impression.  Based on my experiences, the last word I would use to describe French men and women is "romantic."  Rarely did I see them smile.  The Germen, on the other hand are very friendly.  While I was on board a ship cruising upstream on the Rhine River, I met these German old ladies and men.  We had a good time there.  They tried to communicate with me in lame English—one thing almost impossible in France, and even though we did not quite understand each other, the guess was always ended with loud laughs.  Seeing them so happy, I mad a wish that someday when I get old I would like to have a life like theirs.

More photos at here.

There are sequels of some blockbusters that came out years, even decades, after the last installment had hit the box office.  Many of these flicks served more as a long-time-no-see old pal than a system restorer whose task is to retrieve the glitter and glamour its ancestors had created; as a matter of fact, those movies are so awful we can't help questioning why the producers, or the leading actors (so far, no actress), would risk their reputation to make such lame movies—could it be that the cheap film maker was trying to hitchhike a famous series and make some easy money, or that the aging actor was trying to grasp the audiences’ fading memory of his celebrity and create yet another round of vague applause before he actually vanishes from the big screen?  I bet all the critics would have believed that neither of the two cases would apply to this Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (such a long name), as Spielberg and Lucas have been icons of creativity, and Harrison Ford has not been forgotten by the audiences.  However, after seeing it, I have to say, together, these three big shots of Hollywood are not able to break the curse that, when it comes to movie sequels, a late-born baby tends to be crippled.

The storyline is not at all worth discussing as it is a typical cliché, anyone can effortlessly guess correctly what it is:  Dr. Jones sets off to search for the crystal skull, while a bunch of bad guys are hunting him down.  He finally finds it, but it immediately falls into the hands of the villains, who then are caught in the collapse of the temple, or some kind of shrine, and die.  Dr. Jones once again barely escapes with just some bumps and bruises on his old but unnaturally agile body.

I was sitting in a fancy Italian seafood restaurant at the Fisherman’s Wharf years ago, when the enthusiastically professional waiter was introducing the entrees to me, each of which would cost me more than US$50.  So how did I spend a small budget and get to taste a little bit of each of some of these expensive dishes?  Bingo!  I ordered a COMBO.  And it is exactly what this movie is like—a dish of seafood combo.  The only thing unique about this movie is the name, “Indiana Jones;” and if you think there must be something new, you are wrong.  Can you believe that, after all it’s a Lucas + Spielberg movie?  Throughout the entire movie, the audiences will feel senses of daja vu.  I did.  Sitting in the cinema, I had a delusion that this movie was actually not a sequel of Indian Jones, rather, it is a sequel of The Mummy, or E.T., or National Treasure, or The Da Vinci Code, or others I could feel but was not able to recall the names.  The laughs Steven Spielberg deliberately tried to generate only occurred in the children and teenagers.  I might not have yarned but the muscles on my mouth certainly did not move a bit.

The two most important special effects came when the sea of ants drowned soviet soldiers and the ancient tomb was breaking into rubbles and swirled into the air when the alien space ship was lifting off, but any moviegoer would immediately point out that these two scenes are copies from The Mummy Returns.  The oos and ahs often heard in Lucas and Spielberg’s works did not happen this time.

Another failure was the figure of the alien.  When Lucas was creating Star Wars, he did not want his aliens to be like that stereotyped big-headed human-being-like creature with gigantic eyes, a narrow neck and long slim limbs, neither did he want his space ships to be flying saucers.  So what we see in the Star Wars series are all kinds of out-of-imagination extraterrestrials and bizarre space traveling machines.  I can bet my life that the shape of the alien and the flying saucer were not Lucas's idea.

The only ingredient that makes this dish a bit tasty is the appearance of Dr. Jones’s son, acted by Shia LaBeouf.  His cuteness and attraction to teenage girls is as good as that in Transformers.  And it is the reason why my daughter asked me to take her to this movie.

Although I am disappointed in this film, I have not lost my faith in Spielberg and Lucas.  I trust their next movie is going to raise my eye brows again.