Holiday !

Advantages: Nice sweet film, romantic comedy
Disadvantages: Not the best romantic comedy I have seen, some may find it too sickly sweet!

...where she discovers Amanda. They decide to take a break from their troubles and get away from the men in their lives so house swap for a couple of weeks over the Christmas period. Amanda swaps her luxurious modern house in California for Iris?s quaint little cottage in the English countryside. Iris soon makes friends with Arthur a retired screen writer and sets about trying to help him. Her love interest comes in the form of Miles (Jack Black) a film composer who works with Amanda?s ex. Amanda meanwhile meets Graham (Jude Law) who is Iris handsome brother and has an eye for the ladies. Will it be a holiday romance or will both these women find love when they least expect or want it? ***** My Thoughts ***** Having missed this at the cinema I was very keen to rent it to watch, certainly keener than my husband who did agree...

AJ26 14.05.2007 · Read review
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Review of The Holiday (DVD)

My Tokyo experience

Advantages: Very nice trip, worth going back again
Disadvantages: No

...Japan is always one of my favourite country to visit in Asia. Let me share with you my itinery in my last trip. This tour took place when I last visited my parents in Hong Kong. Day 1: Got up at 6 to get to the airport for the flight at 9am. After 3 and a half hours, finally arrived at Tokyo. Went to the toilet straight after, there are still two types of toilet(the Western and Japanese styles), like the way it was when i came a few years ago. Weather was not too bad, a bit cloudy but not too hot. Arrived at hotel at around 6 and started my Tokyo adventure after a brief break. Last time I stayed in the Ginza area which is quite commercial. This time, I stayed in Shinjuku, which is like the Soho of Tokyo. much more exciting, with lots of department stores and restaurant. One of the places that I would definitely go when...

medgenie 26.06.2008 · Read review
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Review of Tokyo (Japan)

The Beckoning Cats of Tokyo

Advantages: Culture. Interesting
Disadvantages: Difficult for foreigners to understand the cultural significance

...Maneki-Neko, Japanese Beckoning Cats, can be found in the shop windows of stores and restaurants in countless streets of Tokyo and any other of Japan’s major cities. If you take a peep into the windows of the noodle shop, eateries of all types and stores, you will come across the Maneki-Neko grinning somewhat impudently at you from the counter and inviting you into to savour the produce of the shop. In business, the Maneki-Neko is believed to bring success because her raised paw beckons in customers. It also welcomes in personal happiness and harmony. A black Beckoning Cat brings health, while a gold one, which is quite rare, brings in riches. Beckoning Cats one often sold as money boxes. In a house they are supposed to beckon in good friends. Actually the Japanese beckoning cats are part of a very ancient...

ashford 03.07.2001 (27.09.2001) · Read review
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Review of Tokyo

Trip report from Tokyo

Advantages: Exotic for people from the west, it is a very safe place, toilets :-)
Disadvantages: Expensive accommodation, language barrier can cause problems, a bit crowded

...This trip report has also been posted on my homepage http://gardkarlsen.com. Here it is displayed with pictures, videos and links. So please feel free to visit my site. Millions of men in dark suits, crowded subway trains, sushi, taxi drivers with white gloves, neon lights, earth quakes, capsule hotels, sake, sumo wrestling, samurais, geisha, bullet trains, toilets so advanced that you need an instruction manual to use them, manga, polite people, Lost in Translation?.this is our trip report from JAPAN. A short summary The dream team Nikki and Gard on another adventure :-) This time we headed for Japan and we traveled in the period May 15th to May 28th 2005. We started out in Tokyo where we stayed for about a week. We used a Japan Rail Pass to get to Nagoya (the World Expo) and after that we went to Kyoto where we stayed 5 nights...

gard 27.07.2005 · Read review
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Review of Tokyo (Japan)

A superb value hotel in one of the best Tokyo locations

Advantages: Clean, modern, excellent location
Disadvantages: Small rooms and not cheap, but not many places in the area are cheap!

...I'm lucky to have never stayed in a bad hotel in Tokyo. For this trip I decided I wanted to stay near Shinjuku, so previous hotels were out of the question and my budget is getting smaller all the time. Through a combination of reviews on Tripadvisor, rating on hotels.com and a good listing of hotel rates from lowest to highest there emerged a clear winner, the Hotel Sunroute Plaza Shinjuku! Getting there We arrived in Tokyo on the Shinkansen train from Kyoto, switched train lines at Tokyo station and emerged at Shinjuku (one of the major stations in the city). The journey from Tokyo station was easy, it's not hard to get to Shinjuku really as it's such a major station. If you're arriving at Narita you have a couple of options to get to the hotel, you can take the Narita Express train or there is also a bus which stops right...

non_sense 29.03.2009 · Read review
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Review of Hotel Sunroute Plaza Shinjuku, Tokyo

The Holiday - a good chick flick

Advantages: Lighthearted, good cast
Disadvantages: Predictable

...The Holiday is a chick flick type film although it is not quite your normal chick flick. It is based around the story of two girls , Amanda, played by Cameron Diaz and Iris played by Kate Winslet. Amanda is a film trailer producer who has just broke up with her boyfriend, she lives in LA. Iris lives in Surrey in a little cottage and is a writer for a paper. She is still in love with her ex boyfriend who she works with and has just found out he is getting engaged. Amanda starts searching on the Internet for some sort of holiday to get away and try and forget what has happened. She stumbles across Iris's cottage on a website and contacts her about coming over to stay. Iris jumps at the chance after all the pain she has been put through. So the two girls decide to swap homes for the holidays. Once swapped Amanda meets Iris's brother...

wendz86 19.10.2009 · Read review
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Review of The Holiday (DVD)

the holiday

Advantages: good film for over christmas
Disadvantages: chick flick

...The Holiday- I tried to get to see his at the cinema but i unfortunately missed out. Although after reading the reviews it was a mixed opinion, so as soon as it came out i purchased it so that i could judge for myself and its a great film. With Kate Winslet, Jack Black, Jude Law and Cameron Diaz it was an all star cast and a hopeless romantic film a definate chich flick. Its about Iris(Kate Winslet) who is in love with a man who is about to marry another woman and then thee is Amanda (cameron Diaz) who realizes the man she lives with has been unfaithful. The two women meet online at a home swap website and switch homes for the holiday. Iris moves into Amanda's L.A. house in sunny California as Amanda arrives in the snow covered English countryside. Shortly after arriving at their destinations, both women find the last thing...

jo_field26 21.04.2008 · Read review
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Review of The Holiday (DVD)

The Holiday

Advantages: Nice Christmas Film
Disadvantages: Nothing

...with her boyfriend but finds out he has been cheating on her, she is also heart broken and decides she needs to get away from it all and looks into booking a holiday. While trawling through the internet Amanda finds Iris' house being advertised on a house swap website and they both agree to swap houses over the Christmas period. Their houses could not be more different as Iris lives in a little cottage and Amanda lives in a mansion in Hollywood. This film shows Iris and Amanda on a journey of self discovery, travelling across the Atlantic to unfamiliar places they are able to learn more about them selves without them realising it. Both characters meet new and interesting friends while house swapping and this is where the story really begins. While Amanda feels totally out of her depth being in England living in a cottage and driving...

bagpuss1980 21.05.2008 · Read review
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Review of The Holiday (DVD)

Tokyo by Mo Hayder

Advantages: Different time periods integrated nicely
Disadvantages: Begins at a very slow pace before a gradual build up

...-mate and the two Russian escorts with whom Grey lives and works. It includes Shi Chongming?s wife in 1937 and an extremely moving friendship he develops with a former colleague and his family who also chose to remain in Nanking when the Japanese invaded. In her earlier books, Hayder displayed a tendency to going into way too much detail when describing any acts of violence, to the point where some readers have sworn never to read another of her books. Although there are fewer violent scenes in TOKYO, they are similarly graphically described. And it?s not so much the description of the violent act that could cause distress so much as the description of the result of the violent act that is a little over the top. People who are easily repulsed by graphic descriptions will probably not appreciate these scenes. TOKYO leads to a shocking conclusion...

damieng 18.02.2005 · Read review
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Review of Tokyo - Mo Hayder

We're all going on a .......................summer holiday

Advantages: Interesting to see the human interactions, good entertainment and fun to watch
Disadvantages: Boring narrator, some families are permitted to 'bail out' and not participate to the full

...Holiday showdown is a program that is currently being aired on ITV2 (so it is a repeat of a series that was aired on ITV1 a while ago) on Saturday lunchtimes from 12.05 ? 13.05. This is a show whereby the producers select two different families, with different tastes that have never met before. They are thrown together and have to go on holiday with each other. The types of holiday are really varied and include things like cruises, adventure holidays, camping holidays, sun and sea holidays, ski-ing holidays, missionary holidays and everything else in between. Each family will go their ?normal? holiday for a week, during which they will go where they usually go, do exactly what they usually do and just treat it like another normal holiday. The following week they will swap over and go on the other family?s holiday. During...

yackers1 27.10.2009 · Read review
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Review of Holiday Showdown