Paris and Barcelona 2009: Part Trois

The day before the trip, we decided to stay up all night so we can sleep on the flight. That way we'd be on Europe time right away - no jetlag. We watched the rest of 'Paris, je t'aime' and followed it up with 'Vicky, Cristina Barcelona'. I really don't see what people like about Woody Allen. The photography is beautiful but I've come away from two of his movies now wondering what all the fuss was about. Anyway, the plan worked: staying up let us sleep on the 10 hour flight to Amsterdam - so the journey to Europe was almost painless.

I hate Air France. They didn't make the effort to bring any connecting flight bags over to their plan. So when we got to baggage claim in Paris, all the international passengers had no bags. Only the people who boarded the flight directly in Amsterdam got their bags. Way to welcome you to a foreign country. As if that wasn't bad enough, they delivered our two bags on two separate days. And the delivery company they contracted with was snooty about speaking English. We had to spend our first two nights in Paris waiting for luggage. They gave us 8 to midnight time windows and would show up around 11:45. And it was the weekend too...bummer.

We learned from our friends after the trip that the airline would have to pay for your incidentals in such events. So what we should have done is gone and bought a bunch of clothes for ourselves and had Air France reimburse us for it.

(End Rant) Taking the cab into Paris, I immediately felt like I've seen this city before. It reminded me a lot of India: a cleaner version of India, but the density felt the same. Roads and sidewalks were not huge, and people seemed less paranoid. If I had to name a city I'd say it felt just like central Bangalore.

To our surprise on our way in, we saw an entire street full of Tamil stores. Not generally Indian: Tamil specifically. I'm guessing that they must be war refugees from Sri Lanka, since France takes a lot of refugees as part of the UN. I heard a few of them talking, and it definitely sounded like Tamil with a Sri Lankan accent.

Paris and Barcelona 2009: Part Deux

Its the weekend before the big trip! All the visa's were approved without a hitch. We just got back from our trip down to San Francisco for the Schengen. The trip was just a day, but man, what fun!

We hung out with a couple of Divya's friends in SF. They were great fun, and we had a wonderful time. It really felt like a whole weekend, not just a single day. The weather was perfect: a welcome change from Seattle's grey.

So here I am the Sunday before the trip. Seattle seems to not want me to leave: its thrown a beautiful October day in my way to tempt me. But we've been watching "Paris, je t'aime" for a few days now. The shorts have left us frothing at the mouth for the City of Lights. I can't wait to get there.

We've got a day trip planned to Mont. St. Michel and a couple of other cities in Brittany. We havent really planned anything else - we're gonna try to do what ever we feel like while we're there.

Paris and Barcelona 2009: Part I

We're making arrangements for our first real vacation in two years. Paris and Barcelona. I'm so excited!!! But first we have to run through a gauntlet of visa stampings. We need Canadian visas so we can get to Vancouver to stamp our US visa. Without getting the US visa stamped we can't apply for a Schengen visa to Europe. And we can't get the US visa stamped within the US, hence the Canada trip. But wait, there's more! We also have to go down to San Francisco to get our Schengen visa because the French consulate only does in-person appointments. So we essentially end up doing two trips so that we can actually make our vacation. I really envy my friends from Canada and Hong Kong - they don't need a visa to go to Europe. This is one of those times when being Indian sucks!

So while we're getting all our paperwork together for visas, we're looking up places to stay in Paris and Barca. Hotels are way too expensive, hostels aren't bad. But I think the best value for money is a vacation rental. I found a nice Barca apartment, only minutes from Las Ramblas by metro. Paris has been harder. I guess we should have started planning our trip earlier. But we've got a couple of leads so we should be able to sew that up in a couple of days.

I find myself getting quite paranoid. All it takes is one denied visa to destroy the whole plan, not to mention flush thousands of euros down the toilet. Let's hope everything comes together! We're both quite busy at work and our weekends are all booked up for the visa trips. I think we'll be completely exhausted when(if?) we finally get on that flight.

But wild horses can't keep me away from Europe. I have a serious case of wanderlust. I haven't travelled much at all and am dying to see the world and experience different cultures. We've resolved that come what may, we're going to travel like crazy these next few years. It's nice to have a wife who thinks exactly like you do :)

Planet Hulk: review

Spoiler alert: some general plot devices revealed though not in too much detail.

I've never actually picked up a Hulk comic before this. I've only seen his exploits as part of other Marvel teams like the Ultimates and the Avengers. I tend to stay away from superhero comics in general, the genre has been done to death and reads like a soap opera more than anything else. It's a franchise, which means the suits are involved -and that means they're not really going to let the authors get too crazy. Unfortunately, too crazy is where great comics need to be.

Superhero comics are still my guilty pleasure though. Its the equivalent of the Friday night movie, sometimes you just want to see intergalactic space battles on a scale that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. I was reading an interview on the upcoming Green Lantern "Blackest Night" series and was impressed with where Geoff Johns was taking the Green Lantern universe. So I decided to head down to the local Borders to catch up on what's been happening with GL.

Alas, they didn't have any of the Geoff Johns GL story arcs. I started looking for other guilty pleasure comics, and that's when my eye fell on Planet Hulk. I'd heard about this arc ages ago: The Hulk saves the Earth from a killer satellite, only to find that his friends had seized the opportunity to blast his return ticket to an uninhabited planet. Along the way, a navigation error crash lands him on a different, war torn planet called Sakaar - said navigation error being caused by the Hulk going berserk within the shuttle once he finds out he's betrayed. Not GL, but still plenty of alien races and fighting, so I bought a copy and settled down to read it.

The first part of the story reeked of Ridley Scott's "Gladiator". It was pretty much the same story with intergalactic races replacing humans. A weakened Hulk is pressed into gladiator service, where he must bond with his friends and fight his way to freedom on a planet ruled by the oppressive Red King. My attention was waning. The main thing that kept me going through this part was the prophecies surrounding his arrival: they spoke of both a savior, the Sakaarson and a WorldBreaker. Take one look at the Hulk and you realize he obviously has the potential to be both. He has always been the mighty monster forever at the mercy of circumstance. Will he submit to his rage, or on a planet full of monsters, will he finally find the peace he has long sought?

With some help from the Silver Surfer, the Hulk and his friends break free from the emperor's grip and make a run for it. Some of his allies are wise and know where to draw the line so they don't end up becoming exactly like their cruel oppressors. Others, like the native Miek (a play on meek perhaps), oversimplify the Hulk's logic - often to tragic ends. This was the part where it got interesting.

The story is epic in scope. By epic I mean that by the time you finish reading this book and pick it up from the beginning again you will feel a sense of how far the characters have progressed from their beginnings. Neutral characters change to become malicious in some respect, benevolent in others. Either way you will feel they have landed in a very different place from where they started. It mirrors how life changes people, how their experiences alter their view of the world, and how they are part of a never ending cycle where changes in them will cause changes in others, and so on and so forth.

But though it is epic, it doesn't sacrifice fleshing out Hulk's character. The authors achieve this by using his ragtag group of rebels masterfully to explore Hulk's personality - they are attracted to the Hulk for different reasons. Miek looks up to Hulk's deep loyalty to his friends and his thirst for revenge, but fails to see that the Hulk has already seen the price of his wrath: and works to contain it. The Shadow warriors in the meantime see that this green monster has compassion, and follow him in the hopes that he might fulfill the prophecy. Still others come just for the protection afforded by his brute strength. By uprooting the Hulk and putting him on a new world, the authors have given an opportunity for his story to be told anew. This was perfect for people like me who hadn't followed the Hulk before. Behind every fictional character there usually are a couple of defining forces at work: struggling for balance. With the Hulk: this arc brings out clearly the monster looking for peace, fighting his own nature to try to achieve it, goaded on by circumstance. For all his power he is helpless to stop what fate has in store for him.

I loved the art. I think they were trying to go for an alien Conan universe. The Hulk is depicted as a bestial strongman, a look he wears with ease. Some of the flashbacks were told with a different visual style: I liked that. However, the epilogue had a different art style which I didn’t like so much. It was more anime influenced, and I prefer the clean cut art style used in the rest of the book. Some of the panel progressions were also a little confusing. I caught myself wondering more than once if I missed a page when the scene changed. But I didn’t mind this so much because I think the authors were going for a more atmospheric feel: you feel like you’re viewing a world from the sidelines, rather than a rehearsed drama that plays out before you.

The story itself is nothing to write home about, except towards the end. The oppressors are overthrown and a new reign is established. All is well for a bit, and then that's when things start to get interesting again. I didn't see the ending coming and I won't ruin it for you. But it plays into the Hulk's everlasting role as a tragic hero and the dual prophecy of the savior, the Sakaarson and the WorldBreaker. All in all it's a pretty entertaining read.

This is a good arc, but there definitely are some things that keep it from being great. It again comes back to superhero franchises and how they are the bread and butter of the graphic novel business. There’s a lot of cheesiness that hurts the experience – you keep getting reminded that this is a comic book instead of an epic tale. Since it was a limited series run, a lot of little nuggets about the Empire’s brutality and the torture of the “lesser” races on the planet is consigned to the guide book at the end. While so much emphasis is given to exploring the Hulk, some of the other characters are mere stereotypes. I felt the whole femme-fatale-becomes-Hulk's-lover plot line to be very predictable. The Red King could have been more nuanced, instead of the power drunk madman he turned out to be. There could have been more politics, considering this was an entire world the Hulk was trying to unite. These fallacies make the book fall short of what it could have been: a Hulk classic similar to what "The Dark Knight returns" turned out to be for Batman.

You know that feeling you sometimes get when you finish reading a great comic? When you look up and feel like you're coming back to the here and now from another world entirely. Somewhere towards the end of "Planet Hulk", you begin to get that. But it is so fleeting, it disappears almost as soon as it appears: I wish the book had hit that high note earlier and stayed there for longer.

Rating: Almost Great 7.5/10