[TIFF 2008 Day Three]

It's Day Three of the Festival, Today's events at TIFF was a relatively light one, having scheduled only 2 screenings today, one being Pang Ho-cheung's Trivial Matters (I would try hard not to pass up watching a Hong Kong movie in glorious Cantonese language) and The Code, a Japanese movie about codebreakers, which I found out was just a teaser for the actual story that didn't have much to do about that subject after the first engaging 10 minutes.

As I had signed up for an Imperial Palace tour beforehand, I didn't feel that it was right to cancel it at the last minute, even though I could. So it was perhaps also a good break from the schedule of weekend events, for some time off from the movies to rest and relax a little, before the next burst of energy for the upcoming week.

While I was lauding the precision and punctuality of the Japanese, I got a little worried when I was running late for the tour I signed up for. From deciding to switch train lines rather than stick to the current one which might take longer considering the number of stops it made, as a rookie I was in for a surprise because although the train lines might stop at the same station, they could be as far as half a kilometre apart! So what turned out to be time saving from reduced number of stops, turned out to be quite the nightmare to trek from one train line to the next.


That said, the last leg was on a train line that didn't have any trains call on the platform. Being one station away and in a rush for time, the decision was to walk the rest of the way, and as it turned out, while I was indeed late for the tour, to my surprise it hasn't really started, so I didn't miss anything. When I went back to the same station after the tour, it was discovered that there was an earlier incident at one of the train stations along the line that had temporarily disrupted service.


My discoveries for the day continued when I popped into the Press Center, this time with my eyes wide opened, and remembering that hey, the members of the press will be taken care of, and beverages provided at no charge, courtesy of one of the sponsors Coca-Cola. At least now I can lighten my load and need not lug around a bottle of water, or to hunt for drinks along convenience stores en route to Roppongi Hills, or stop by vending machines, not that they're difficult to find one in Japan. This is Day Three, from the Tokyo International Film Festival.