The Brad Kean Blog

Another indicator that the Chinese are my kind of people - one of the expressions you can use to say hello to a good friend is “Have you eaten?”  You’re not necessarily asking them if they want to go eat, you’re just saying hi.

On Saturday I finally got a chance to go to The Great Wall.  As walls go, I have to admit that it’s pretty great.  First, you hike up a bunch of steps that lead up to the wall:

Then you walk along the wall itself.  The portion of the Wall that we visited, Mu Tian Yu, has a 3km walkable length. 

For the following picture I posed with my arms outstretched.  It was an inside joke between me and the photographer.  We had noticed that people in Beijing really love to take pictures with their arms outstretched.  It’s their “go to” pose when the pressure of the lens hits them.  When I got home and looked at the photos, I realized that there’s a lady in the picture right behind me doing the exact pose.  Except she’s doing it unironically.  I had no idea - perfect timing.

When the festival ended I flew back to Beijing.  Now that I’m in China again, I can afford recreation!  The other day I went to a lake a couple hours outside Beijing and rented a paddleboat.  I’m working my way up to a Cannes yacht in baby steps….

May 22 was a mad dash to the finish.  The students’ projects had to be finished and uploaded for judging by 6pm.  They all managed to pull it off, creating some impressive films under a tight deadline.  The next night we had a screening held in the Palais (the main building with the red carpet).  I ran projection from a laptop connected to a Christie 2K projector in the booth - meaning the films were seen in their full high-definition glory.  Afterwards the winners were announced and prizes awarded.

Later the staff went to dinner on the Croisette (beachfront road) to cap off the program and discuss how everything went.

The films can now be seen on the Reel Ideas website at http://www.realideasstudio.com/.  Click on the “AT THE THEATER” link. 

Each night as premiere time approaches, people stand outside the Palais in their evening attire holding up signs asking for tickets.  The festival gives certain amounts of exclusive tickets to companies and individuals.  If someone requests a ticket and doesn’t use it, the following year the festival will reduce their allotment.  So if they can’t go, they hand them to those clamoring for tickets outside.  If you’re willing to stand outside the doors for a couple hours, you can get into some interesting movies.  I’m not.

The guy in the military dress on the right reminds me - a bunch of U.S. Navy guys were walking around and the next day a bartender told me the Military Police busted them all.  Apparently they’re not supposed to wear their uniforms walking around on foreign soil.

The S.V.P. at the bottom of everyone’s sign means “si vous plait”.  French way of saying please.

Check out this girl’s face when I looked at her sign and said “Two Lovers?!  Hey hey, darlin’, I can get you halfway to your goal.”

Okay, I didn’t really say that.  She didn’t look like she would find that as funny as I would.  Do you think hanging out with angry-face on would help your chances?  Either people would feel sorry for you and give you tickets or be put off and stand clear.  I wonder if she ever got in.

Paul is one of the Reel Ideas staff members.  He’s an honest-to-goodness Frenchman.  In honor of this distinction, many of us took to calling him “Le Paul”.  Naturally, that makes me “Ze Brad”.  Sometimes we stand around looking formidable:

We stayed friends until a woman came between us, at which point Paul became so entranced by her beauty that he could no longer hold his tough guy face:

There are a lot of mega yachts anchored at Cannes for the festival.  Can someone tell me what’s up with this cruise ship?

Why in the world would a cruise ship have masts on it?  I mean come on, could this thing really use sails?  Maybe the captain insisted on it.  He watched Pirates of the Carribean too many times.  “I demand we raise sails like the pirates of yore, plundering the seas as we play shuffleboard, daiquiries raised to the sky.”

Two weeks in Cannes and I didn’t even have to learn the French street names.  The walk from the Palais des Festivals to home can be plotted by landmarks.  Walk away from the beach, turning right at Ashley Judd onto the green ball street.  Keep going until Kevin Spacey, at which point I turn right and I’m there.

The Cannes apartment shower isn’t as crazy as the Beijing one, but it’s got some weird style to it also.  There are two knobs, but they’re not for hot and cold.  The knob on the left is for pressure and the knob on the right is for temperature.  The temp knob even has degrees written on it, but it’s in Celsius so I have no idea what it means.  Come to think of it, I wouldn’t know even if it what Fahrenheit.  Do you know what temperature you like your shower?  I think showers should always be done by feel.  We don’t need this kind of precision.  The thing I really like, though, is that the temperature knob has a red button. 

Can you guess what it’s for?  Basically the temperature knob only turns so much and then it stops.  If you want to turn it more and access hotter temperatures, you have to press the red button in.  The funny thing is that the threshold is the difference between kind of warm and pretty warm.  So you get to push the red button every time!  It’s like you’re handling a major shower emergency with every washing.  But that’s okay, you just press the red button and handle the crisis like it’s nothing.  Because that’s how you roll.

Check out the shower door.  What’s wrong with the full shower door system?  Are they saving on glass?  See the women’s shaving cream on the edge?  I forgot my shaving cream so I stole a little the other day.  My face smelled like delicious strawberries.  Made me hungry all day.

The red button reminds me – a couple weeks ago in Beijing I went to the bank to pay my phone and electric bills (that’s how it works there).  The kiosk where you take a number was all in Chinese, so I just pushed a random button and a number popped out.  There were lots of people waiting but somehow my number came up quicker.  I think I accidentally pressed the VIP executive button or something because I totally cut the line and tried to apologize.  I went up to the counter and explained in Chinese that I don’t speak Chinese.  I could see the panic in the teller’s face – she didn’t speak any English.  I noticed there’s a red phone off to the side.  She turned, weighed the decision, then picked up the red phone.  Another woman in a nice suit comes out of nowhere, from behind me, and starts speaking English.  This was only surprising because I didn’t expect someone that wasn’t Batman.  Normal humans normally aren’t on the other end of a red phone.
 

If you want to hear about the glitz and glamour of Cannes, all you have to do is turn on E.  Therefore, I’m going to cover the things you don’t hear about in the news coverage.  Like my laundry.

Yesterday I was starting to run out of clean laundry.  I’ve gone through clothes pretty quickly, since you generally wear casual during the day and then formal for evening events.  My apartment in Cannes has a washing machine, so I threw most of my stuff in there.  I don’t think it’s working.  The clothes come out sopping wet with detergent streaked all over them.  And that’s after running it a second and third time with just water.  The water is musty so the clothes smelled bad. 

Giving up, I threw everything into a plastic bag and went to a local coin operated laundry.  I used two washers and one drier.  That took $20 in coins.  I’m convinced there must be something in Cannes that’s cheap, so I’ll keep looking and report back when I find it.

Yeah, Cannes is pretty exciting.