2007 in review

This year has been quite a major one for me. I could describe it as eventful and flawed. Unlike 2006 which was "absolutely flawless" as George Michael says.

Mostly it was very stressful...studying for the Bacalaureat exam was not at all delightful. We had to go to school even if all we did was waste time and get up early in the morning (although as I said in one of my previous entries, I miss Sincai), the BAC-subject teachers were really demanding and pressured us to study, while the others were either understanding or annoying. But no-one cared about the latter anyways ;).

Then after the BAC obstacle was passed with good grades, I had to get ready for the Architecture university entrance exam. Underprepared and not innately gifted, I failed so I ended up studying Civil Engineering. Which is not proving too enticing so far, but hey it's been just the first semester of the first year, what's best is yet to come. Or at least I like to think that.

The rest of the summer was pretty much boring...all I did was sleep and waste time. I had 2 short trips during August, but as I said before, I had a brilliant autumn. The best of my life. But that was the topic of a previous entry.

2007 was filled with plenty of deaths. Among people who I knew were Mrs. Colceriu (the "famous" History teacher, my 2nd fave all-time teacher), a classmate's mother and a middle school classmate who died in a car accident. And then there were the well-known people: Octavian Paler, Florian Pittis, the patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Ralu Filip, Antonio Puerta, Boris Eltsin, Luciano Pavarotti, Chris Benoit and just a few days ago Benazir Bhutto. And these are just a few. It was definitely a black year.

But there were 4 new entries in my family this year! My cousin Brigitta and her husband got their 2nd daughter in January, and her sister Cristina and her husband are the parents of triplets born just a few weeks ago. Yay! I can't wait to see them!

My wishes for 2008? Many. Too many to mention.

It is extremely hard for me to choose one last song. 2007 was crazy, exhausting, freaky and unpredictable. Bittersweet. So yes, the song is "Bittersweet Symphony" by The Verve.

Commercial Break

Dear oh dear, it's ages since i wrote here, but now I have a good reason to do so. Last night was a prolonged commercial break for me as I went to the Night Of The AdEaters and I can say that it was worth the effort of sitting for more than 6 hours on those terrible chairs that Republica cinema have (seriously now, do they even realize that they're ridiculous to ask for 8 lei a ticket and provide those ass-killing seats?!).
6 hours filled with ads of all types: hilarious, sad, boring, shocking or plain stupid. Half of them were "wear a condom!" campaigns, others condemned child abuse, pollution or smoking and the rest...well the rest were product advertisements. Of course, the very popular football-related commercials were on display again...the likes of Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry, Raul, the omnipresent Ronaldinho and the even more omnipresent Beckham showed off their skills for Adidas, Nike or Pepsi (which is still not as good as Coca-Cola no matter what they do haha!). The only other celebs were Madonna advertising for BMW (a funny clip with the great "Song 2"by Blur as its soundtrack) and Nicole Kidman kicking it off with some dude for D&G, which is good because I always find these type of ads really boring and corny.
Speaking of boring...have you heard of "carosello" commercial? If not, you are one lucky person. Goooooosh they killed me. Those damned Italians. They had like 5 minutes commercials where all they did was sing and then they sit down to eat and one of them realizes how delicious the butter is and the host takes out the butter pack and says that it the best. Gaaah.
Most videos were from The Netherlands, Switzerland, France and Belgium, but the Brits had some good ones too. And I'm glad to say that two of my favorite ads were Romanian ones: an anti child abuse ad whose punch-line was "Hide and seek is not a game for an abused child" (quite disturbing vid...it got me thinking for a while) and an ad which encouraged viewers to read books saying that "For our brain cells, reading is like sex". Needless to say that the video presented brain cells having a veeeeery good time. But the whole concept was very original so thumbs up.
All in all, the show was well worth the money and effort to stay awake and despite the fact that almost 3/4 of the ads contained either sex or nudity or just innuendo, it was nothing too out of line and I'm pleased I attended it.
Song of the day? Obviously "Song 2" by Blur. I wish I could've posted some ads from the AdEaters but I can't find any :(