Why Is a Raven Like a Writing-Desk?

Inspired by kathputli_girl's own recently-posted list, I'm making a list of all the Bollywood movies I've watched! I attempted to put it in chronological order, but I only started keeping a list after watching thirty or forty-odd movies, so I don't remember exactly the order. Also, I forgot like, half, of the ones I've borrowed from Naani, so the list is not at all complete. I'm . . . working on that. >_>

Anyway, ( on to the list! )

Ugh ugh ugh applying to grad schools is no fun. :(

In better news, though, I have been going to the gym every day this semester and I'm proud of myself. ♥ I'd really like to lose another 30 pounds ideally, but haha no chance of that. Also, I went to belly-dancing and jujitsu classes! I'm terrible at belly-dancing, but rather liked it. Jujitsu I also liked, but part of my brain kept going, "this is not how we did things in karate and therefore is wrong! >_<"

I've been to half my classes so far (as my two Asian Studies teachers are in India until Monday - for which I am totally jealous D:) and, uh, eh. I really like Women in Lit, which I didn't expect. Communication Among Cultures looks boring and I really, really hope I get Art/Music credit for Flamenco so I can drop Art of the Western World and take Spanish Conversation instead.

Also, unrelated to me: SRK and Kajol are going to ring the NASDAQ opening bell on Monday, apparently. Awesome~ ♥ (And I need to find a theatre that's going to be showing MNIK, omg. The Bollywood theatre I used to go to in Jackson Heights closed during the strike and my hometown's art/foreign film theatre doesn't seem to be showing it. Argh. >_<)

Happy New Year's Eve! 2009 has been, I'm pretty sure, the best year of my life, so I'll be sad to see it go. 2010, you'll have to work super-hard to be awesomer, but I'm rooting for you! xD

Also, I saw The Princess and the Frog and loved it to pieces, omg. So much that I went to see it again the next day with my sister. And would have happily seen it again the day after that, but no one would go with me. ;_; But, um, basically: I was not disappointed at all, I liked the music way more than I thought I would, Ray was nowhere near as annoying as the previews made him seem, the whatever-the-non-Bollywood-term-for-song-picturisation-is of
Almost There" was amazing, and Aladdin/Jasmine are facing strong competition for the title of Hottest Disney Prince and Princess from Tiana/Naveen. ♥ On the other hand, Randy Newman is decidedly not a lyricist and Naveen and Tiana should have had their own love song, rather than piggybacking on Ray's.

( And a year-end survey~ )

I hope everyone has a great New Year's Eve!

*________* I - I really don't have any words. Please excuse me while I watch this 700 more times.

Oh wait, I do have some words - HOW IS KAJOL SO GORGEOUS. It should not be possible to be that pretty. *__*

More - OMG SRK-KAJOL TOGETHER AGAIN. I can die happy now, lol~ ♥

Okay, the MNIK promotion is ridiculous - this is the trailer of the trailer. xD But, yaaay, there are clips! And omg, how pretty does Kajol look? ♥♥♥ And the bit where SRK smiles? *melts*

4 days 'til the actual trailer! :D

Yay, bullet points~

- Done with classes!! Of course, I still have an essay due, I think, Monday, but no more classes or tests, woo

- 2 1/2 days 'til my mom comes to visit me! ♥ I'll show her around Sevilla, then we're going to Cordoba, Carmona, Arcos de la Frontera, and Morocco, then we go home for . . .

- CHRISTMAS ♥♥♥ It's been kinda hard to feel all Christmasy with 65 degree weather, green leaves, and palm trees everywhere, but yaaaay I'm so excited to go home for it. This is the first year in my life I haven't been home to help decorate the house and get the tree and everything, which has been really hard, but omg Christmas yaaaaay ♥ xD

- 6 days until the My Name Is Khan promo comes out! *dead* Ah, I cannot wait for this movie!

- Paris was great and pictures are forthcoming . . . eventually, as usual. :P

- Disneyland Paris at Christmastime is quite possibly the single prettiest thing ever. I, ah, may have cried gotten slightly teary-eyed a lot. >_> But then they put Mickey in a blindingly sparkly silver suit and made Peter Pan disco-dance and I was kinda done crying. xDDD

- A hand-drawn Disney version of The Snow Queen with music by Alan Menken? *_* Yes, please, omgx1000!

Basically, today was a good day. :D

Off to France (and Disneyland Paris, eee~) tomorrow! Seriously, I have the best life ever pretty much. ♥

But, anyway, the point of this entry: ( long-belated pictures from Norway! )

Seriously, everyone should go to Norway. I really, really love it~ ♥

Back from London! It was, with the exception of a few bad experiences, a pretty good trip. I will get a picture-filled report up eventually, promise, but I should get around to Cordoba and Oslo first. xD

Anyway, some random Bollywood stuff: The trailer for My Name Is Khan is releasing a) 18 December, ie: less than a month omg ♥ and b) with James Cameron's Avatar, which is craaaazy, because that's a fairly big, mainstream Hollywood movie, right? (*does not follow American movies that are neither 2D-animated nor musicals >_>*) If SRK and Kajol start getting even minor mainstream attention here, I will die of happiness. ♥ Ahhh I cannot wait for this movie!


Also, I am randomly super-excited for Chance Pe Dance after seeing the trailer with Kurbaan. And I suddenly have a crush on Shahid Kapoor, wtf? I never found him attractive before and he doesn't even look different here! (And I still have issues with him over the whole Kareena thing, so I am really resenting finding him attractive but argh I want to see the movie anyway. xDD)

And speaking of Kurbaan, woooo 4 seconds of screentime, half of which were the back of my head! :D Simmy got her whole face in for, like, half a minute, of which I am very jealous. And I squeaked so loudly every time I saw Webb that everyone in the theatre thought I was crazy. XD

( As for the actual movie )

( And some pictures! )

Norway as soon as I get the pictures organised!

I finally met with my intercambio (Spanish-English conversation partner), yay~ I signed up in September, but no one e-mailed me for ages (probably because my name is impossible for Spanish speakers to pronounce xD), and when someone finally did, our timing got messed up and we kept missing each other for a couple of weeks. So I'm happy we finally got to meet! We practised by translating Disney movie titles, talked about how Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are apparently shooting a movie here, and I promised to lend her some Bollywood DVD's, as she's never seen any. All in all, a pretty successful first meeting. :D

Secondly, I got my next semester schedule all arranged and OMGGGGG I'M GRADUATING ( . . . hopefully?) IN MAY WTF. O____O So now I have to start looking at jobs and grad schools and I'm kind of freaking out a lot. (One grad program I am dying to get accepted into looks so great, though. A summer at Middlebury, then a year in Berlin or Mainz, and then I have my Master's. By the time most of my classmates will have their Bachelor's. I would feel so smart, hahaha. And of course I really, really want to study in Germany. ♥)

But, um, yes, my schedule:
M/W/Th 12:15 - 13:25 Modern China
M/Th 15:05 - 16:20 Japanese Fiction
M/Th 16:30 - 17:45 Women in Literature
T/F 10:50 - 12:05 Art of the Western World I
T/F 13:40 - 14:55 Communication Among Cultures

Hopefully, my classes here in Spain will fulfill my art and diversity requirements so I can get rid of the last two and take something interesting. :\ But the first two look awesome. ♥ And they're taught by two of my favourite professors, too. And no waking up early, yay~ :DD

Also, I'm leaving for London tomorrow! Any recommendations for what I should see? I haven't been there since I was 9, so I barely remember anything. The British Museum, the Tower of London, and Madame Tussaud's (where I will totally not take a million photos with the SRK statue >_>) are the only definites so far. And, of course, seeing Kurbaan!

Finally, ( looong-overdue pictures of Seville! )

Okay, 8:00 - 8:30 and 15:00 to about 15:40 are the scenes I was in, omg! I don't see myself or Simmy, but omg those are my scenes!! I will never stop being excited about this. xDD (Also, I can totally still recite all the dialogue from the classroom scene - they repeated it endlessly.)

ETA: At around 15:34, the girl in the sweater with the pulled-back hair, way in the back? OH MY GOD THAT'S TOTALLY SIMMY. I can't believe she made it into 'the making of the film' thing!! Ahhhh this is crazy! <3

Part 2 is here, but it doesn't have any scenes at Webb so it's much less interesting. :P

http://www.planetbollywood.com/displayArticle.php?id=n110409091956
So apparently, they named a crater on the moon after SRK? That's kind of amazingly epic. ♥

(Also, ARGH NANO. 8 days in and I haven't yet broke 2000 words. I am way too slow a writer for this. ;_;)

Also:

omgggg at about the 17 second mark, that's Simmy's school! I was watching when they filmed that scene! This is so awesome. :DDD

HAPPY 44TH BIRTHDAY, SHAH RUKH KHAN!! ♥♥♥

(And let's pretend the stupid Spanish Internet let me post this on time, shall we?)

Anyway, to celebrate, some of my favourite SRK dance numbers! And for the sake of those not as horribly biased as me, I've organised them as . . .

( Top 5 with Kajol! )

( Top 5 with People Other Than Kajol! )

A) So I am apparently crazy and have signed up for NaNoWriMo. I've never written 50k words of a story ever, let alone in a month. But, eh, since we don't really have homework here, I have a lot of free time. (That would be better spent on my graduation application and grad school applications, but I'd prefer to put those off 'til the last minute. >_>)

B) I decided to try cooking this weekend, and I made kheer, aka possibly my favourite dessert ever! The kheer I made . . . could not even charitably be called my favourite dessert ever, but it wasn't terrible, either, and it tasted much better when I reheated it the next day. Does anyone have any easy (vegetarian!) recipes they could share so I could try cooking something else? Indian food would be preferred, as I've been craving it like mad, but I'm open to anything.

( C) Pictures from Spain, fiiiiiinally! )

From an interview with Rensil D'Silva on Kurbaan:

Do you have a favorite scene?

The script reaches a point were there is a debate in a classroom between the moderate voices of Islam and some pretty radical voices from the West. Where issues like 9-11 and Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq are seen in a very heated debate where hopefully I have put forward the points. It sees it through the prism of the US using the first invasion of Iraq, with Bush Senior, as a means to further their arms deal and the inclusion of the CIA into what is now the Mujahideen, right from the time of the Soviet invasion. The CIA's intervention to create the Mujahideen, and now the Mujahideen striking back at the US and their interests; a lot of issues I think that might not have been dealt with in previous mainstream Hindi Cinema - I hope to at least address some of it. I don't think it would be totally good to say I have resolved it or anything, but at least I have nudged the mind of the viewer more into that direction.

That's my scene!! Eeee. :DD I don't think I'm ever going to get over this whole extra thing. And I cannot wait for this movie to come out~

In preparation for my upcoming trip to Norway, I've been researching my family history there. I don't know exactly what I plan to do with my research, but it's cool to know the names and hometowns of my ancestors. A few things seemed particularly interesting to me.

First, my last name just pops up out of nowhere in 1789. Sylfest Sylfestson Dvergedal Olnes and Kristi Lassedatter Kvam Hafslo have a kid named Lasse Sylfestson Olnes Aarvoll, and we've been Aarvoll (later anglicised to Orwoll) ever since. But where the heck did that come from? Why aren't we the Olnes family now? (Also, I totally want to change my last name to Dvergedal. Best name ever, omg. xD) My da used to tell me that one of our ancestors took the last name Aarvoll from the name of the farm he worked at, but I always just thought he was making it up. I guess maybe he wasn't? (He claimed the guy's name was Peder, though, not Lasse.) ETA: Ah, and now he says that probably when Lasse bought a farm named Aarvoll, he changed his name to reflect his land-owning status. Makes sense.

Second, I noticed quite a few instances where the kids took the mother's last name instead of the father's. I wonder if this was common in 17/18th-century Scandinavia, or my family was just weird. xDD

Thirdly, there are some people who I assume are distant relatives of some sort, who have been researching this, as well, and they've traced one branch back to frickin' 1200. Ragnvald Urka (or possibly Urika, my handwriting is super-messy XD). How great a name is that? :D

Also, reading this makes me rather sad that my grandfather broke the family tradition and didn't name my da Sylfest. There's been at least one Sylfest every generation going back at least to the mid-1600's. My favourite has four brothers (sons of a Sylfest, naturally) named Christian Sylfest, Sylvester, Lasse Sylfestson, and Sylvester Martinus. I'm surprised they didn't name the daughters Sylfestina or anything. xDD If I ever have a son, Sylfest is definitely going to be his middle name, at least - I want the tradition back!

Finally, I'm writing ( . . . eventually) two novels set in Norway (because my love for the country is not evident enough already?), and the names of all the female characters but one are all in my family tree. Oddly coincidental. (And I hope the remaining name is just old-fashioned, as it's meant to be, not totally inaccurate. >_>)

Um, and I will get around to posting my Spain pictures someday, I promise!

First, pictures are uploaded, so I'll post them probably after classes today.

Second, OMG I'M GOING TO NORWAY. :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD I am so excited, I honestly cannot even describe how excited I am. :DDDD As fictiveprophet can now attest, I am a huuuuuuuuuge dork for Norway. It's my favourite country after Ireland, and I've wanted to go since, gah, since I learned that my da's side of the family came from there, so, like, since I was 5 or so?

I have a language program on my computer and I've been practising Norwegian with it, and omg, it's the most fun language to listen to ever. ♥

Okay, this probably came out totally incoherent, so I shouldn't babble anymore, but eeeeeeeeeeeeeee Norway!!!!!!! ♥♥♥♥♥

Sorry for the long time between updates - Spanish Internet is absolutely awful and prone to stopping for hours for no apparent reason.

Because of this, it's taking forever to upload my pictures, so those'll be a while yet.

Now, though, I'm all settled in my apartment (shared with three other girls, but I get my own room. Also, a balcony!!) and am slowly getting used to the city. It is sooooo weird to have to buy my own groceries. oO

Classes are all in Spanish, which actually isn't as difficult as I was scared it would be. I can understand almost everything, though my speaking could still use a lot of practice. I'm taking Cultural Anthropology of Latin America, Flamenco: Cultural Expression of Andalucia, Phonetics and Phonology of Spanish, Corrective Phonetics and Conversation, and Contrastive Grammar Spanish-English, all of which look to be fairly interesting.

I'm kinda scared of the crappy Internet here shutting down and eating everything I've written so far, so that's all for now. More updates when I get my pictures up!

Oh my God, I'm leaving for Spain tomorrow. O_____O (Well, actually, tonight, I guess, but it's weird considering 9 pm tonight at 1 in the morning.) I totally do not feel ready, aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh. My Spanish could still use work and I'm not totally packed and I'm going to have to lug around three suitcases plus a huge carry-on bag and I'm getting so stressed. xDD

On the plus side, I love Seville sooo much and I'm already having extravagant fantasies about jetting off to Barcelona and London and Paris and Venice and I am very excited for all that. ♥ (Though I definitely will not be able to travel that much. :P)

I'll be on a five-day orientation in Granada, Marbella, and Málaga starting tomorrow, so if I seem even more absent from LJ than usual, that would be why~

Oh, also, I got almost a foot of my hair cut and I am so not used to it. I got it cut and donated 10 inches to Locks of Love back in 8th grade, and since then I've pretty much been on a continuous cycle of grow it back to mid-back-length, cut it again, grow it out again, cut it again, etc. But I don't think I've ever cut it this short (barely even shoulder-length), it's all layered and shaggy, and the stylist almost completely cut off the top layer of hair in the back, so the front is blonde and the back is never-seen-the-sun-dark-brown, so I keep seeing my reflection, not recognising myself, and freaking out. xDDDD

Anyway, so until I get my apartment and computer in Seville set up, ¡hasta luego!

*I totally have not been waiting all summer to use that line. >_>

GAH I'M 20. I FEEL OLD. O____O

Anyway, because our birthdays are right next to each other and I'm firmly convinced she is the prettiest person ever and that no one can possibly have too many pictures of her in their lives, what better way is there for me to celebrate my birthday than with . . .

( a gigantic Kajol picspam? )

In non-birthday news, I saw the sixth Harry Potter movie and my main reaction is NEEDS MOAR LUNA. But, erm, that's my reaction to everything Harry Potter ever, so I dunno how valid it is. xDD I'm also impressed (and really, really glad >>) that they somehow made a 5% plot/95% poorly-written teenage romance-filled novel into a mostly plot-filled movie!

Also, I do not appreciate the weather this summer. :( My ideal temperature is honestly high 90's or a teensy bit higher, and I've resigned myself to it generally only reaching the 90's for a week or two every summer. But this summer? I don't think it's even reached 80 once. I haven't even worn shorts once because it's been too cold. Not cool, summer. >_<

Oh, and finally, I just got back from a weeklong vacation, so if I seemed an even worse commenter than usual this week, that would be why! We just went to the Jersey shore, nowhere terribly exciting, but I went to the beach every day and saw dolphins once, so a success overall, I think. ♥

( Random picture time! :D )