My Mastercard commercial

Phone bill for frantic calls and texts home, having lost my passport less than 48 hours before a transcontinental flight:

$11 CAD

Having passport photos taken three times to meet Canada's ridiculously anal specifications:

$18

Bribe of police chief to expedite the writing of an incident report for lost passport:

$18

Emergency travel document to leave Sierra Leone, procured through two days of exhaustive paperwork and generally astronomical stress levels:

$29

Changing flight six hours before takeoff to add a day-long stopover in Nairobi:

$50

Helicopter to Lungi International Airport to ensure I caught my plane to Kenya:

$78

Utterly useless day-long stopover in Nairobi:

$204

Final cost of temporary passport at the Canadian Embassy in Rwanda:

$206

Coming face-to-face with critically endangered mountain gorillas, climbing to the top of a dormant volcano, and just generally getting to take the vacation my brother spent $5000 to fly halfway around the world for:

Priceless

In a culture where the majority of advertising campaigns are remarkably awful, Mastercard really did hit a home run with that one; it managed to ingrain itself so deeply into North American culture that I not only appropriated it for this blog, but even felt weird not ending it with, "There's some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard." And I don't even own a Mastercard.


Editor's note: I'm back, both on the continent and in the blogosphere. I touched down in Toronto Tuesday afternoon and am thrilled to be home. But while my eight-month adventure abroad has come to an end, this blog won't follow suit quite yet. There are still a few posts to come detailing my trips to Morocco and Rwanda, as well as a couple Sierra Leone ones I merely haven't had a chance to post. Though I'm sure the audience will fall off considerably now that I'm home, I'll try to get these final posts together by the end of the month, in between catching up with friends, playing baseball, and starting the new job.

Help me reintegrate ... by watching movies!

In my last post, I ruminated on the dangers of reverse culture shock. Presumably, you, the concerned reader, thought to yourself, "This simply will not do. How can I help Mike minimize these feelings of isolation?" For the answer, I'm turning to the cinema.

This blog has made repeated mention of my love of music (like here, for example, or here. Here too), but save for the occasional Anchorman reference, I've given no play to my other pop culture passion, film. Until now.

The way I see it, if I can quickly update my grasp of Western cultural iconography by ravenously devouring the most important flicks of the here and now, I will in the process minimize at least one avenue for potential alienation. And that sounds like a pretty good excuse to watch movies to me.

Here's where you come in. Some films are obvious must-sees whose buzz has reached me even in Freetown, such as Slumdog Millionaire. But there are many, many more for which I am relying on the considerable knowledge of my film nerd friends.

Thus, I am now accepting proposals for single- and double-feature bills of the best the movie industry has pumped out in the last eight months. Both in-theatre and video release options are acceptable.

The annual cache from the November Oscar blitz will have hit rental shelves by now, I presume, but I'm also down for some light summer fare at the cineplex. After all, this is by far the longest stretch I've gone without adding a five-digit AFI number to my collection and I'm straight-up fiending. (If you've never gone to the movies with me, don't even try to understand this last comment.)