Day 64 - The Toreador Song

Bang! Bang! Bang! Here come the bullets!

• Gaming. I did play some more Brothers in Arms, but the PC I had yesterday was taken, so I had to start over. I think I can now pick up where I left off on PC 24. It's good to remember. It's a fun game, but one that requires some discipline as you have to use supressing fire and flanking effectively. Also it's not as easy to survey the battlefield in zoomed out mode as I'd like. Ah well.
• Eating. Dinner last night was mostly almonds and cookies, the vegetarian's version of the high calorie diet. Heh.
• Carmen. So I watched a french opera about spanish gypsies performed by the state opera of Prague. Some people in the audience said the french was pretty terrible, and the subtitles in czech weren't useful for me. Czech is one of the wierdest languages I've encountered. It sometimes seems like they have an irrational fear of vowels. You know the letter z? It's a word in czech. You know when Homer jumps around saying, "I am so smart! I am so smart! S-M-R-T! I mean S-M-A-R-T!" Smrt is a word in czech. It means death. My head spins. But I digress. I had the foresight to look up the synopsis of the play on the Metropolitan Opera's web site. It's basically the story of a woman who wants freedom. She supports the freedom fighters. She loves who she wants. Unfortunately for her, she seduces the wrong man to stay out of jail, Don Jose. Don Jose forsakes a woman he's supposed to marry and his career in the military for Carmen and the life of a resistance fighter. When his morther takes ill, he goes to see her, promising to return to Carmen. Carmen takes up with a bullfighter, and when Don Jose returns, she tells him to get lost. Don Jose, forsaken and jealous, kills her. The end. It's about what I'd expect from an opera. There weren't really any fat ladies, though. At least none with a major role.
• Giger. I only mentioned going to see the Giger stuff in Switzerland because I thought it might be a silly thing to do if it was convenient. It didn't seem that convenient, so I gave it a miss. Now the guy is freaking following me around. A travelling exhibit was in Berlin while I was there. It arrives tomorrow in Prague. Just to keep him off my back, I'm probably going to go. Are you happy now, HR? Hehe. Also, I saw a museum for a czech artist who does lovely art deco glass painting. I think they're art deco, anyway. I'll probably stop by today.
• Travel plans. It's time to book a room in and train for Budapest. One of the malaysian gals from Florence sent an email saying what activities they enjoyed there.

Truth be told, I'm ready to come home. Matthew's giving lectures on the history of console games. I've been writing notes about the eight bit style game I want to write in my little notebook. All this touristy stuff feels like a big waste of time. I have work to do.