Sunday, November 27, 2011

"Are you alright?"

Fifteen to twenty crew members ask me this with concern in their voices every morning as I run around trying to get things prepared for my boss's arrival. The first couple days I always answered with a martyr'd sounding, "Yeah, no, I'm good, thanks..." and wondered exactly how awful and freaked out I must have looked to have THAT MANY people concerned about me.

I'm not sure how it clicked, but somewhere I realized their heartfelt "Are you alright?" is the English version of my "Hey, howyadoin'?" Oh, yeah- there's English and then there's English English. I felt like a jackass for letting my drama queen answer for the first few days. Now I toss it right back:

"Hello, Bianca, are you alright?" "Hey, yeah, howyadoin'?"

Our 2nd AD is doing his best to train me away from a lifetime of American English. The trash can is a bin, my trunk is my boot, and its not WATER, its WAH-UH. I'm not very good at it. But I have adopted the long, cute British phone goodbye.

Rather than the usual, Thanks-Bye-Hang-up, I notice calls end as follows with both participants speaking in a higher and higher pitch until its kinda singy:
"Ya, alright, thanks, cheers, bye, buh-bye!" And its a call-and-response, too, so you can really get into a few rounds of the "bye, bye" section. Adorable. I can't help myself.

Furthering my transformation away from American Girl, I've pretty well mastered Right-side driving. I don't hesitate with crossing lanes to turn right, I've figured out the rhyme and reason to roundabouts (hint: KNOW where you're going and PAY ATTENTION to what lane you need to be in) and I'm now comfortable running over someone's lawn to pass. The roads are narrow- usually too narrow for two cars to pass comfortably, so both cars drive half on the grass, gutter, or embankment on either side to make it. I'm excellent at this.

I found myself so good at Right-side driving, I got relaxed enough to re-adopt some of my awful American driving habits like working while I drive- UNTIL exactly 30 seconds into writing a reminder to myself on a piece of paper when I drove onto the curb of the highway. The curb was too high for me to drive off lest I pop my tire, so I stayed on the curb/sidewalk until it disappeared for a second and I was able to steer my car back fully onto the road- and realized I had popped my tire anyway. See sheepish in the dictionary? That's me.

(What's funny is all three driving Americans had an incident of some sort on the same day. Two flat tires and a busted side-view mirror. The crew definitely had a laugh about that.)

Sun sets over The White Lion Hotel, our Thanksgiving hosts
Uncle Sam says "Eat your turkey!"
 This week was Thanksgiving ("It's a big deal to you people, isn't it?" said my 2nd AD). Being NOT in America, we had a full day's work but afterward found a restaurant in nearby Aldeburgh (the ONLY restaurant) serving a Traditional Thanksgiving Turkey dinner. The appetizer choices were hot wings or mozzarella sticks- clearly American (?), if not traditional fare. We didn't care, we went straight for the turkey (amazing), green beans (actually yummy) and sweet potato mash (oh yeah) topped with pretzels (...what?).
Happy Thanksgiving!
Pretzels, my new Tgiving tradition



                          The restaurant was bleeding red, white and blue wrapped in Forth of July decorations and we couldn't get enough. It was really very sweet- Yay, America!

Our shooting schedule has us working 6-day weeks so when you consider I worked all last weekend, this has literally registered as the longest week of my life.  I'm starting to go kind of bats. The hotel I'm in has no gym and I'm working from before dawn until well after its dark. On the suggestion of one of my set friends, I decided to try running at night after I got home. I was so restless, I was open to anything...

So it's black as pitch here at night. No streetlights. None. I knew this and decided to run anyway thinking my eyes would get used to the dark. They don't- it's THAT DARK. Thank God for my flashlight app (yeah, I'm in love with my stupid iPhone, shut up.), its the only thing that kept me from breaking my ankle on the uneven roads. Also, I don't know my way around my neighborhood- I haven't had the chance to explore anything yet- so my plan was to keep the curb on my left and I would retrace my steps... instead, I found our neighborhood pub (ANOTHER place I haven't had time to explore) and realized I just jogged a 10 min circle. I chalked the experience up to "super stupid" and made fun of myself for doing it. Until-

Cheshire Cat watches over my run.
I did it again. Hotel life is either lonely as hell or you're in the hotel bar every night. Having spent every night in the hotel bar to this point, I decided to try again. This time I was armed with a working knowledge of which street I would take and I had Rihanna's new album to keep me company. And it was pretty fantastic.

There is really NO ONE around and it is REALLY DARK so if you want to dance down the street or pretend you're running away from a hideous maniac in the dark or sing at the top of your lungs with the wind blowing your hair around like you're starring in your own music video you totally can.

I know because I did.

This was the scene as I left my hotel for my run tonight. I actually had a bit of dusk to light my way the first few minutes.





This pic has nothing to do with this post other than its what I woke up to this morning and ITS SO DAMN PRETTY!!!







Monday, November 21, 2011

thirty-five minutes...

Is the grand total of sleep-- I'm lying, I snuck in a 20 minute nap midday Sunday, so 55 minutes is the grand total of sleep I've had since I woke up at 830a Sunday morning. Its Monday night, almost 11p.

I'm pretty impressed with myself.

I haven't had a melt down, I haven't even cried. And today was one of the hardest days of location for me: Move-in day. Imagine all the stress of moving into a new house and hooking everything up, discovering the internet doesn't work, the coffee machine is too fancy to figure out and you've been frying every electronic device you've been plugging into the wall.

Oh yeah. Something about voltage and maybe watts or transformers and numbers like 220 and 110 and 13 volts floating around. THANK GOD Apple products are all yoked up and ready to work internationally. Not so much for the Radio Shack computer speakers that squeaked out one last burp when I plugged them in. So it looks like I'm going shopping for a few things.

A little warning, yall? I've heard a bazillion times I don't need to tip at a pub, but I've never heard about the all-mighty English power of electricity that is so behemoth as to literally electrocute my poor little electronic toys to death. Have I...?

The house I'm in is stupid. As in phat. Or like dope. Or along the lines of "OMFG THIS PLACE IS EFFING AMAZING!" (Became very aware of my grandma with that last sentence, yall know what I'm talking about.) Huge with lotsa bedrooms, but who cares because the ACRES OF ENGLISH GARDENS are where I want to sleep and eat and shower and live forever. I want to roll around in the herb & vegetable garden. I want to sleep in the heated pool. I want to dance in the flowers- this, I will do.

I didn't know I loved English gardens until I walked through this one and had a prettygasm. It is so damn pretty! But difficult to photograph. In fact the only picture I've taken in this place is of the best toilet in the world.
It ain't an English Garden
I like toilets. They're important. 

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Hey, I should totally blog this...

...I thought while having breakfast with my cousin Brian in London.

I've blogged all my major trips (all two of them, whatever) but it's been a long time since I traveled.  And since then, the internet has exploded into massive overshare with Facebook, Twitter, etc, of which I participate (Follow me! Friend me! Nah, you don't have to...) so it took weeks for blogging to occur to me when I found myself traveling again.

But here I am, now: a writer (who hasn't written anything in months) with a great new job (that I both love and then not-love sometimes) that gives me to opportunity to travel the world, so why not? As I sat in Brian's kitchen eating blood pudding with hammy bacon and waxing poetic on the relationship of travel to inspiration, there I was- inspired to write again! Using more than 140 characters! Nice!

A quick moment of prequel... eh, nevermind, I kinda just did that.

So anyway, because I've already spent a month working in Alaska I'll do a quick speed-through:

Anchorage, Alaska: bleak, cold, desolate, beautiful, ugly, shady as hell and easy to navigate.

Anywhere around Anchorage: raw, natural beauty. A whole spectrum of "Holy shit..." inspired landscapes. I spent so much time trying to take pictures at snow-covered mountains as I drove that my inner monologue was continuously writing and re-writing the news lead: "LA women crashes into gorgeous mountain and dies in fiery snowball" was the usual.

And I wasn't the only one- for some reason it became one of our favorite games to play on set. "Make-up artist spontaneously explodes into fiery snowball..." "Movie producer falls overboard tour boat into fiery snowball..." You could die in any way as long as you met your ultimate fate in a fiery snowball. I loved it.

I had my first two helicopter rides in Alaska, and I gotta say- if you think Alaska is pretty from the ground, it blows your damn mind from the air. Helicopters are fun, fun, fun. I always wanted to levitate, and that's what riding in a helicopter is. Both times we floated over and landed at glaciers that were so graceful and gorgeous that words are too small to describe.
Glacier Mouth... say ahhh...
I can honestly say Glacier #2 (of course every single one of these big girls have names and naturally I can't remember a single one) is the most beautiful place I have ever been to in my life. See for yourself...
No words...
If Alaska has to be so effing cold, at least its to make unreal stuff like this. And Jesus, was it cold.

The rest of my Alaska impressions are tangled in with all my badass crew members. GREATEST CREW EVER. Man, I loved those guys...
Love.
Which brings me to...

The UK! Suffolk, to be exact. Woodbridge, to be more exact. Rendlesham Forest to be ever more exact. The first time I saw the address, I got tired.  Suffolk is 2 hours from London, a county of tiny villages on the North Sea. I haven't seen any of it yet- I've been working my ass off since I got here, staying in the production office til dark, and lemme say: dark is DARK in Suffolk. It's country, yall.

A few things I'm excited about for this location...

Accents. Sweet lord, do I love British accents. I have crushes on every person I've met so far- male, female, gay, old, pot-bellied... I'm open for business. Just sayin'.

Right-hand driving. Meaning driving on the WRONG side of the rode ("RIGHT SIDE" my new accented friends jibe me) in the WRONG side of the car. The first 2 times I drove, I followed one of the guys to and from work like a duckling. The next day, when I woke up 2 hours late and 1 hour from my catching my train to London, I threw my Sat Nav in the car, roared onto the road, and made it to the office only getting lost twice. Nothing like a greater fear to overcome your other crap. (Feel free to use that nugget of brilliance in your daily mantras & affirmations.)

Aliens & ghosts. As my driver drove me into town for the first time, he informed me Rendlesham was UFO and ghost central. Despite 12 hrs of travel I perked up like it was my birthday (It was my birthday!) and got him to tell me everything he knew, which wasn't much. Still, I've quizzed everyone who will answer and its true! Rendlesham is the Area 51 of Europe. More on this as I do research, but I heard of a haunted hotel that I'm determined to spend a night in.

London. Instead of spending my first weekend in Suffolk laying groundwork for any possible future making-out, I took the train to London to work for the weekend. London is SO CLOSE I dream of dashing out to get my boss big city things I can't find in Suffolk like cute boots and cashmere sweaters- er, I mean Cuban cigars - on a weekly basis. We'll see, but getting to spend the weekend here was outstanding!
Oxford Street






Pee or call...?
LOVE a great bathroom!













One of these things is not like the other...
but all equally phenomenal!


Big fan...