Valentine's day

Yesterday was a great Valentine's day. I looked forward to it for two weeks and I wasn't disappointed. First we woke up at 6:30 AM (gawd) and baked our usual v-day cookies. Then that evening we went out to eat steak at Ruth's Chris steakhouse. Which was yummy. Last, we went to see another Bollywood movie, Jodhaa Akbar. I had been looking forward to this movie ever since they started showing the previews for it three months ago.

Essentially, Jodhaa Akbar is a love story between the Muslim Mughal Emperor and his Hindi wife in 16th century India. It stars Aishwarya Rai (Bachchan), who I think is terribly beautiful. The movie was widely anticipated, and we didn't get good seats because the theater was so full. The film showed at Grand Cinema, which has taken over the Hindi movie niche from the closed Siegen movie theater. Steve and I have started to go see the Bollywood movies. This is my third one (excluding the more American ones, like those by Mira Nair or Bend it Like Beckham). It was a trip being in the movie theater with so many people of another culture. The people sitting next to us were very nice and would take a minute to explain various parts of the movie to us. Since I don't know anything about Indian history, some parts were hard to follow, so I'm sure I missed out on some important details. The movie was long. Something like 3 and a half hours, with an intermission (all the Bollywood movies are longer than U.S. movies and they all have intermissions).

Surfing around the net to learn more about the context of the film, I learned it was being protested by some people in Rajput for its historical inaccuracies.


More later.