Santana Row & Borat
After a fairly tiring Friday (especially for Ivy who has a lot going on with her classes, job as a Webmaster, and occassional battles with Kaiser's bureaucracy), we were up for some fun in the evening. We cruised over to Santana Row (a faux-European pedestrian street that is pretty lively with shops, restaurants a big bookstore, a Fantasia boba cafe and an art gallery) and went up to the lounge in the funky hotel Valencia. The place is definitely classy & cool with walls of beads you have to pass through to enter into a dimly-lit area filled with couches and candles. There was some funky music in the background and we expected Vaughn and Sydney from Alias to show up at any moment. There's also a balcony that overlooks the street. In honor of the new James Bond movie coming out (we haven't seen it yet), I ordered a martini (though James probably doesn't get his with apple flavor like I did) and Ivy got a mojito. We then walked over to the theater and saw the outrageous, crude and yet quite funny Borat movie with Sacha Baron Cohen. Jesse S had first told us about him and his Ali-G persona a few years ago and we were amused just by hearing about his exploits as a hip-hop interviewer of important people (e.g. he interviewed Andy Rooney and Pat Buchanan. He asked Pat, "Yo, so why was dere no BLTs found in Iraq? Yo, so how long was you President?.... Just like with Ali G, Cohen's comic talent lies in asking interesting people stupid questions and then seeing how they react. What he also did as Borat quite a bit was expose people's prejudices regarding Jews, gays, muslims, etc. Overall, though, I was impressed with how most of the Americans he interviewed proved themselves very courteous and surprisingly tolerant. Of course, he exposed some dark prejudices that many people harbor and he went after some ignorant people who he was pretty sure would provide some incendiary comments for all to see. Although he went over the top in many areas (vicious jokes regarding Jews in particular--though he is Jewish; and the naked wrestling scene with his "Kazhak" friend took raunchiness to new heights), overall we are glad we saw it.
On Saturday, we went rollerblading in the afternoon, cleaned our place and worked on our websites.