Day Fifteen – My Favorite Movie

Here we go with “favorite” again.  I’m not a big moviegoer.  I can’t tell you the last time I was in a movie theatre.  My best guess would be when I was in China.  In four years, I know I went twice.  I did, however, watch more movies in China because I had a teaching assistant, Alice, who would sometimes spend Friday night at my apartment to be there for Saturday morning lessons.  She loved watching English movies, so we often had movie nights.

I don’t have a subscription to any streaming service because I don’t watch enough movies or series to make it worth my while.  In total, I may watch 4 to 6 movies per year (for the last 10 years, but hey, I guess that adds up).  I do have a bunch downloaded to my external hard drive that I occasionally watch, or I use one of those “Napster”-like sites to download.  Shhhh…don’t tell.  Then there are those shady sites that you must back out of ads in order to watch a movie, I use those once in a while too. Again, shhhhh….don’t tell.

I can tell you my dad’s favorite movie was, well he actually had two, “The Quiet Man”, and “Song of Bernadette”.  I went through a phase when I thought “The Exorcist”, “Friday the Thirteenth”, etc. were cool.  Not so much anymore.  There was also a time when I loved the classics, with “Casablanca” and “Gone with the Wind”  topping the list.

Of all the decades of my life, I probably watched the most films in the 80s.  Admit it, that was a great decade of movies.  Some of my favorites were, “Dead Poets Society”, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, “Fatal Attraction”, “Bull Durham”, “Die Hard”, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”, “Back to the Future”, “The Last Emperor”, and of course, “A Christmas Story”.  I could go on, but you get the idea.

I was into “foodie movies” for a time.  Not surprisingly one of my favs is “Ramen Girl”. I also like “The Hundred-Foot Journey”,  “Julie & Julia”, “Chocolat”, “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman” (this may be in Chinese with subtitles.  I know that’s how I watched it.), and of course “Ratatouille”.

Of course, travel movies are in my top choices, but I am not going to get into those.  I wrote a blog post, “My Favorite Travel Movies”,  and you can read about those in the link.

However, as I plan to leave Poland at the end of this year, travel planning is constantly on my mind.  I need to get to Flying Tiger and pick up a wall map of the world while I am contemplating my course.  Even though my “plan” is to not have a “plan”, some structure is required.  I am considering a stop in Romania first and then working my way across Türkiye.  From Türkiye into Georgia and Azerbaijan.  After that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and maybe a couple of other stops in that part of the world are on my list…you know, the Silk Road. Here I meet a fork in the road, head up into Mongolia, down into China, South Korea, and Indonesia, or spend an extended period in India and then on to China.  Either way, I plan to spend time in India and maybe even drop by and say “hi” to the Dalai Lama if he still receives audiences.

You are probably asking yourself what this has to do with my favorite movie.  Even though I talk about it in the blog mentioned above, it is the last movie I have watched and will probably watch again.  If you read the blog linked above, you can skip this next paragraph because I cheated and am repeating what I said there.  I mean, why reinvent the wheel?  The trailer is linked to the movie title below.

If there is one movie that best explains the feelings, the experiences, the ups and downs of the last 10 years of my life, it is  A Map for Saturday.  Although I am not a young backpacker, on the road for a year, or staying in hostels (I have but not usually my first choice), it does do a great job of showing all the feels.  I have mostly had a home base in some country or another over my journey, but I have also traveled extensively during this time.  Those first hours of being alone in a new destination, meeting people throughout your stay, and knowing when you leave it really is “goodbye”.  Most of the time it isn’t “see you later” because deep down you know you probably will never see these people again.  The movie’s filmmaker, Brook Silva Braga, quits his lucrative job as a producer with HBO Sports and documents his 11 months of backpacking around the world.  During those 11 months, he spent time on four continents, Australia, Asia, Europe, and South America.  The title of the film comes from the fact that when you are on a long-term travel with no obligations, every day feels like Saturday.  When I eventually return to the States (yes, someday but no idea when), I would love to talk to young people.  Their parents will probably hate me, but I want to tell them to take that “gap year”.  A foreign concept to most Americans but it is embraced by other cultures.  What you can learn when you move out of your comfort zone and embrace the chaos of Asia, or the mindset of Europe is not something you will learn in the classroom.  I agree that lifestyle, even for a year, or my lifestyle which has been even more long-term isn’t for everyone.  But I can’t repeat it enough if you have even the smallest desire…GO!  Even if you aren’t a young person who hasn’t settled into a 9 to 5 life, if you are someone unhappy with a job, or just want to experience living a different culture from your own, even if it is for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months…GO!

If you want to understand my lifestyle and what it might look like next year because it is something so hard to put into words, watch this movie.

The words of Freya Stark, “I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling?”