Last Tuesday (April 9th) Rosendo and I headed downtown. We wanted to check out the
Cleveland International Film Festival, but we also enjoy taking pictures. He’s in a photography class, and I will always take an opportunity to brush up on my skills. He had the day off, and I decided to take the day off from subbing so we could have an adventure downtown. It was the perfect time day to do a bit of movie watching and photo taking!
I’ve been wanting to go to the CIFF for years! I never knew about it years ago, but only learned about it while I was in school in Cincinnati, so I was never able to make it. A few months ago I looked online for when the festival would take place. But at the time I didn’t really have anyone to go with, and it was still too early to know what films would be shown! Luckily, Rosendo loves movies so it wasn’t hard convincing him to go with me!
When we got downtown (and survived my panic attack trying to find parking) we ate and hung out a bit. Then we used our college id’s to get us into a movie for free! The first movie we saw was called, “Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth.” It was a documentary film in Spanish and Maya. In a nutshell, the film was about how the Mayans today believe humans are destroying the Earth because we aren’t living in harmony with it. I’m terrible at describing things, so I’ll stop there! :)
After the movie we spent several hours walking around downtown and taking pictures. We only walked around a small fraction of Cleveland, but it felt like we saw so much! There were some really funny moments. I don’t think people are used to seeing two people walking around with SLR cameras just taking pictures. The first moment was right when we started taking pictures. Rosendo started taking pictures inside Terminal Tower, so then I decided to do it too. A girl comes up to us and says, “What’s going on here? What is this?” We tried to explain that we were just taking pictures, and she asked if we took family portraits. I let Rosendo do the talking and he tried telling her he didn’t take pictures of people. In the end he ended up giving her his number. It was pretty funny.
A few moments later, right when we walked out the door, another lady starts yelling at us. I finally realized she was asking what kind of cameras we had. We walked over, and she asked about our photography. She then asked if we took pictures of each other (like what?) and offered to take a picture of us. We politely declined; she probably wouldn’t even know how to use them! When we walked away Rosendo said that we should probably not talk to anymore strangers. Luckily, that was the end of the crazy conversations.
After our photo adventure we ate at Hard Rock Café. Can you believe that was my first time there? Afterwards, I got a milkshake at McDonalds, and unfortunately their sundae machine was down so Rosendo didn’t get anything. I’m a sucker for ice cream.
We finished our day with the 8:20 showing of “White Tiger.” It was a Russian film about a mysterious German tank on the Russian Front and a Russian soldier who couldn’t die and could talk to tanks. Sounds weird but it was actually a really good movie! I like war movies so I might be a bit biased, but it was my favorite of the two movies. I wish we could have seen more, but tickets were pretty expensive. Thank goodness we got one for free!
It was an overall fun day being able to explore downtown.
