Now at the Pax Hotel on Schiekade Next to an Old Vacuum Cleaner Store Like in Once on the 2nd to Last Day of the International Film Festival Rotterdam

Yesterday, Dinderdag, was the coldest, windiest, rainiest day it has been in Rotterdam thusfar and it completely justified my bringing of this oversized ski jacket I toted along. It feels like I'm carrying around a bearskin rug. You couldn't stand perpindicular to the ground if you were driven into it like a spike.

I've compiled a list of comments people have made to me about The Adventure to give you an idea of how it was received.

"That opening shot was radical. I thought it was going to go on for the whole film. Not that I would mind." - Shalimar, short filmmaker (She seemed to be using the word 'radical' in the political/social sense rather than the breakdancing sense. I could be wrong.)

"I loved your film." - Peter, Shorts Programmer

"It was very funny." - Arthur, short filmmaker

"It looked like this film was shot in 35mm." - Bartosz, short filmmaker

"You captured what some Americans are like." - I forget the speaker's name. She went on to explain that I captured an unsavory side of Americans very well, or a stereotype that is held about them. We went on to hypothesize that no matter what country you are from, if a couple happened upon a mime in the woods, the reaction would probably be the same.

The most interesting story I have about the film comes from the other head shorts programmer, Juliette. We begin in South Holland, where the programmers rented a house for a weekend to watch and make the first round of selections. A couple of the programmers had watched the film and told the others, "Oh, you have to watch this movie with the mime." There was a chorus of "Oh, no! We don't want to see that. We hate mimes!" They watched the film and the rest is history.

This reminds me of something Bartosz said to me after our screening. He told me when he read about the film online before the festival, he was a little worried about screening alongside a movie with a mime because in his film school class there is a girl who always makes films with mimes in them and they're dependably terrible. Ironic, yes?

I thought I might also share some of the practicalities of being at the Film Festival Rotterdam and just being in a foreign country, though most of you have beat me to the punch and know these things already. First of all, I keep everything of value in my front two pockets even though I don't think there is much cause for worry. Back in the States, I keep my wallet in my back right pocket. Here, I've dispensed with a wallet altogether and just keep my paper and plastic money in my front pocket with a rubber band around it. Passport, room key and phone are in my left front pocket. That's it. For good luck, I keep a shell from the Sea of Azov in Russia in my shirt pocket that my very dear friend Andrea gave me.

Nearly everyone here does speak English, though I haven't found it true that they speak it better than native tonguers, which I heard from a few people before I left. Maybe they were joking. Some Dutch sound faintly British when speaking English so perhaps that is what they meant. Most people assume you speak Dutch and will start talking to you in Dutch until you look baffled, or say, paradoxically, "I don't speak Dutch" in Dutch. After that, you can hold a conversation in Engels. You can also just start speaking in English to people and they'll pick up on it, but usually this is only appropriate with festival staff. With strangers and store proprietors, I just ask, in Dutch, if they speak English. The answer is usually yes.

Most Europeans I've encountered here do not know where Georgia is or have even heard of it. For reference, I say it's in the South, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was born there. This doesn't usually help. If they've been to America, it's either New York or California. No one has asked me if I own a gun or an SUV, but I hardly look like the type that could lift a gun or an SUV, so I'm not surprised. No one has mentioned the war in Iraq or how much they hate George Bush. This will probably change when I travel to France.

If there's not a traffic light, you can basically just walk out in front of automobiles and they must yield to pedestrians. But you never walk out in front of a bicycle. Pedestrians yield to bikes. I guess it's harder to stop a bike than a car, which sounds counter-intuitive, but it makes sense after brief observation.

The Dutch can still smoke indoors, so if you walk into any building, restaurant(even McDonalds), or movie theater, people are smoking. This will change come July, when the indoor smoking ban takes effect. A short filmmaker from the UK made a tactless comment about how surprising this was that it's taken so long for the Dutch to institute this policy. He was accepting an award and E2000 for a short film he directed at the time, so that's why I say tactless. It was like an inappropriate political speech at the Oscars.

To come, a festival wrap up...