Valar morghulis

→ Life of PI know most of you probably have seen the movie already, but it seems to me like most people didn't even take a glance at the book. I read the book right after New Years and finished it just two days before I watched the movie. The movie itself is spectacular with incredible lighting, animal animations and still manages to get almost all details of the book right. But again, only almost. They changed a few things in the storyline to make the story fit better for the 'mainstream viewer'.  
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Some of the rather disgusting things they removed for the movie were completely fine. In fact I was quite happy not to see one scene in particular that made me feel like throwing up when reading the book  - the ones who've read the book will know which one I'm talking about. 

One change I didn't care so much about was the love story they added for the movie. This girl simply doesn't exist in the book. But it's not important to the story in any way. It's probably been added because the average viewer wants a love story in any movie, no matter if it fits or not. But well...

Now, there was one scene which made me almost stop reading the book because it's so unbelievable and sounds completely ridiculous. And I think that is exactly why it was removed from the movie. In the book there is a time when both the tiger and Pi don't drink enough salt-free water and become blind because of it. While Pi is lying on the boat, thinking that he's going to die soon, he hears a voice. The voice of another surviver on another lifeboat who is also blind. This man tells Pi that he has killed two persons, a man and a woman. During their conversation the man climbs onto Pi's lifeboat and is killed by the tiger. A couple of days later Pi is able to see again and discovers the bloody remains of the man on the boat. So according to the book version this scene was not an hallucination (or it was still one when Pi had recovered enough to be able to see again). Either way, this is the most unbelievable part of the book and I was curious if they kept it in the movie. I'm not surprised that they removed it, but then again  - is the flesh-eating island of meerkats more believable? In the end, when Pi tells the second version of his story to the japanese interviewers he identifies the blind man as the hyena, the one animal that has killed the Oran-Utan (aka Pi's mother) and the zebra (the seaman).

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After last month was like hell pet-wise, I finally have some good news again on that front. My mom got sick of staring at the empty bird cage last week and from the short time I was at my parents I can honestly say that I've never seen anything has depressing as the empty bird cage in my parents' living room. So on Wednesday we drove to several shops that sold budgies. We actually went to 4 different ones but ended up buying two new budgies at the store we went to at first. These two just caught my eye right away. They were cuddling, picking at each other's feathers and always following each other in this huge cage of birds.


Right now we assume that the blue one is female and the green one could be male, but they're so young that it's hard to tell right now. Usually the color of their noses change when they get older and you can determine the gender by its color. Right now the blue one goes a little bit more in the female color spectrum as the green one, but we'll see.  They're both just 4-5 months old, which means that the pattern of their feathers is still going through some changes. In one pic of the blue one (lowest row, middle)
 you can see very well that they also don't keep their feathers as close when sitting in a relaxed position as adult birds do. The blue one looks like it ate too much in that photo, but this bird is actually quite thin. 

So now we have them for less than a week, but they already ate from our hands, which is a major step in taming birds. But so far they weren't curious or too scared to leave their cage to fly around in the room. But at least our house is filled with the chirping of young birds again. The green one is also a real acrobat, just like Maxi used to be. Sometimes he's just hanging from a twig with just one claw and looking around where he should fly/let himself drop next ;-)

And since my mom hasn't come up with any serious alternatives, we'll most likely call them Nikki (blue one) and Jamie (green one) ♥