Mexican Standoff in Germania

This entry will be mostly about one subject which i'll get to in a minute but first a quick prologue.

To get to koblenz germania our next stop we take a train, and on this train in a group of about ten dutch ladies and one dutch guy wearing something of an ascott. My guess was this was a group of nurses or flight attendants on some kind of weekend trip...in the middle of the week (I'm not trying to be sexist or anything but this is what came to mind... i still don't know by the way). Anyways in the empty train car, they just happened to be all surrounding our seats. Thank goodness they got off like an hour later or I would have lost it......again.

In koblenz, turns out, our hostel is in a fortress. Yeah like a big, old, german, fortress. This is very cool, but it takes us 20 minutes to hike, literally hike, up a switch back trail to get up to the top of this mountain (or large hill) to our fortress. We checked in and did all that good stuff and then wandered through our fortress. This place was cool, it reminded be something of the tower of london, that kinda thing. So were walking around this place taking pictures and there are these tunnels, maybe 15 feet tall and 15 feet wide with cobblestone ground. And as were walking through here I take one or two pictures of john. I tried to set up this picture so that john's face could still be seen in the dark stone tunnel, the result was that the opening of the tunnel was hugely bright and all blown out, which looked really crazy. So then I told John to walk out the tunnel while I still had the tunnel entry overexposed, and this time I filmed it on the movie setting on my camera. I thought this was awesome, so I just mentioned without really thinking about it that I should film my short movie here. The short movie I'm refering to of course is my mexican standoff movie that I had wanted to film while at the resort in mexico, but was foiled by the pesky security guards at the hotel. So I kind of make this comment about making the short movie without thinking that it would really happen. We then continued our day, went to the supermarket, ate some dinner and talked to some of our hostel mates as John I' m sure has described. Then as I was going to sleep I started to think about it more and how that tunnel thing would be a great place to film my mexican standoff movie. So I let John know, I said "John, I'm pretty sure we should film my movie here for real". Before John could say anything I gave it the old "you know, if we have time and if we've seen all the sights tomorrow...so just mull it over" I wasn't sure if it would happen but now I was sure I wanted it to.

Next day, we get goin early and spend four or five hours walking around koblenz seeing the sights, which was very cool. At this point I'd pretty much forgotten about the movie because of all the cool places we saw in the old town in koblenz. But we got back to the hostel around 4pm and we did our normal wind down thing, write in our journals, read, listen to music. Then I noticed that there weren't many people outside the hostel so I thought what the heck let's do it. And John (a little bit to my surprise was on board), so we looked over the lines again grabbed the camera and headed over to the tunnel.

Turns out, 4pm is busy tourist time, and although were not in the main tunnel we still need to stop fiming every time tourists come through the main tunnel. We do all the dialogue first because without that we have nothing. So we do all of John's dialogue first and have to stop abunch of times for looud germanian tourists in our tunnel. Then we did mine, same stoppages. So that was done, sweet, but now I need every other shot that I need...and it turned out there were a lot. We did a couple more shots and then.....my camera ran out of friggin batteries. So we go back to the room and figure that twenty minutes of charging should do the trick to get all of the other important shots and a few insert shot. So we go back out twenty minutes later, and now were on a deadline because we have to go dinner at the hostel during a scheduled time. So out we go, got some great stuff, and becuase of all of the frickin tourist delays the camera battery ran out AGAIN!!!!! Unbelievable. We had like three shots to go ugggh. Dinner. Camera charge. Back at it. OUt we go for the last couple, and now the light is fading so we gotta be quick. Got all the shots we needed in that go. That's a wrap!! great right. Can't believe it actually happened. Then laying in bed I realised we didn't get the most important insert shot of the movie. So after breakfast it was back to the tunnel round number 4. Took our time got the shots and wrapped filming for real!!! Awesome.

My pictures and videos are trapped on the camera ( just I can't transfer them on to this computer) so John's below average outta focus grainy shots will have to do for now.


More to come...