Hacienda

So Sarah and I found one place in town that offers free wireless for its customers... and it is a Mexican restaurant! So funny. We have been eating quesadillas (pictured here), enchiladas (below), fajitas, and drinking margaritas (OK, actually I haven´t had a margarita there yet, but I will tonight because they are highly recommended by Sarah who has tried 2 flavors during our excursions to Hacienda).

Last night when we got there around 9pm, the tables downstairs were all ˝reserved,˝ so we were shooed upstairs (to a nice quieter part of the restaurant with less cigarette smoke!). Then they started testing the sound system and we realized we were seated under a speaker--bummer! There was so much squealing interference (what a girl will put up with for free internet!). Finally, after we had finished our little fajitas (fajitas poquitas en espanol), a nice waiter turned down the speaker above our heads and we enjoyed a few minutes of comfortable internet surfing. (YAY!)

When we went downstairs, the empty restaurant had been transformed in to a crazy nightclub. The beautiful (and YOUNG) people were out in droves. There must have been 100 of them inside and another 100 milling about in the street outside waiting to get in. We looked around and joked to each other, ˝you eat a fajita and look what happens!˝

We managed to push our way through the throngs of people out to the less crowded street and we decided that another night we will go out and try to experience the nightlife (when we are not lugging around our laptops!). It was funny because I am still young and so is Sarah, but we both felt kind of old and fuddy-duddy compared to the rest of the crowd. The drinking age here is 18 I think (it might even be 16, I am not sure) so everyone seems very young to me.

When i got back to the hostel, Sarah and I hung out a bit in the courtyard, as the day had cooled down significantly and it was finally comfortable to sit outside. There was even a nice breeze, which felt like a Godsend.

I watched some TV in my room (can you believe it, I have TV in my room). Lots of channels have American and English movies and shows, with Bosnian subtitles, so that was fun. As it got later in the evening I stumbled upon what looked like a cool show. It was in English (with subtitles) and the main character was this Deaf psychic. When she signed (using ASL) the subtitles would explain what she was saying in Bosnian but not English, and I was able to understand most of what she was saying through a combination of understanding a little of both.

As the film progressed though, it became very disturbing, as it was about this creepy murderer who filmed himself killing little girls in sadistic ways. The cinematography was really intense, especially the ˝psychic sequences,˝ where she would see him killing the girls but always be too late to stop him. I kept watching, thinking that I had already seen so much and I was sure that the film would end with the killer being caught or killed, or at least that there would be some kind of closure by explaining why he was doing this or something. NO such luck. The film had one of those really ambivalent and troubling endings that leaves you feeling unsettled. The super-creepy last shot was a close-up of the killer´s eyeball.... just to give you a sense.

So what this pointed out to me (besides the fact that I should immediately turn off all scary movies and not watch them once I realize they are scary) if that as an American, I am always assuming that films will end with closure and a nice ending that make me feel satisfied. The more foreign films (and some experimental US films) I see, the more I realize that this assumption is not only invalid; it can be dangerous!

So I was totally creeped out, and everyone was sleeping except for me, so I called Toshi. That is the great thing about the 9 hour time difference: I can call in the middle of the night and not wake him up! We talked for a little bit, and hearing about Toshi´s woes about the film he is working on, etc made me feel better and checked me back in to reality.