OK, so it’s one day before we leave KV. Been a great place to hang out. We’ve seen a dozen movies (some of them good), enjoyed the festival atmosphere of the place, and had a few cool trips out of town. The whole spa town thing has been interesting. The ‘waters’ here are meant to cure a range of things. You can buy a special cup, or just use your own at one of the fountains. Not unpleasant taste, quite smooth and a little sulphery. Apparently 500 cups of the stuff will cure poverty, or so it was said in the 18th c. (we imagined the cure to involve death at some point!). Films: best was Searching for Sugar Man, a music docu that was fabulous; we saw Helen Mirren and the director introducing (the world premiere of?) their movie ‘The Door’ set in Hungary (also excellent). A Polish movie (“Beyond the Hills”) was very good, as was “Beasts of the Southern Wild”. A 2.5 hour epic on Brian Eno was also interesting. Last movie seen was Barbara, a German film which was good too. Strange behavior #1: people clapping at the end of the movie. People, there’s no one there! Strange behavior #2: the dude who comes on after the movie is introduced and lays the mike stand and microphone horizontally on the floor. Same guy each time, only happens in one theatre, and is now such a ritual he gets an ovation as he walks on and off. Nice, but strange. Saw a number of other Cannes winners etc, some pretty good but many spoiled by being far too long (2.5 hours was not unusual) and grindingly slow camera work. We came out of many of these films saying there’s a good movie in there somewhere but it needed much tighter editing (of course, this says as much about us as anything else!). Anyways, sore bums and necks resulted… …which made it great to take a break every so often. We visited the Moser glassworks (superb) and watched a real factory in operation. Not often you get to see real people doing their work. This was a real treat. Another trip up the funicular to the Diana watchtower, then a ‘constitutional’ walk through beech and oak forest back down to the town via a Russian Orthodox Church with gold onion domes (St Peter & St Paul). Lovely. more photos to come but blog processing not happening!