A few weeks ago, friends Mickey and Kate and I decided to go to the movies. Ah, the movies! In acknowledgment to our current surroundings, we chose a German made film as opposed to seeing an American film dubbed over or with subtitles. The film was listed as starting at 6:30pm. We arrived by train to the town of Singen by ten after and went to the theater. I couldn't understand how the tickets were priced because it's a different price for different days and different times and different viewer groups... I still don't actually understand how it's priced. I paid some price that wasn't even up on the list of ticket prices so whatever. Anyway, in German you are assigned a seat in the theater in which you are expected to sit for the film. I was glad Kate was there to work out the seating arrangement with the guy at the ticket booth. Kate's German is so significantly better than mine that it's almost not fair to make comparisons. It ends up being kind of funny if you're not used to having an assigned movie theater seat, because you walk in and see so many seating possibilities, but you're only allowed to sit in one place and everyone else in the theater is kind of all lumped together in the same area. Anyway, we went to the concessions line, and after Mickey determined that he did not want to eat the popcorn there, Kate and I tried to figure out how to ask if they had ice cubes (most places don't, and I now know from a later experience that ice cube is "Eis Würfel") for the Cokes that we were ordering. They did not. You literally get a movie cup full of only Coke. Truly getting what you pay for, eh? It's not good, it's not bad... it's just different.
We took our room-temperature Cokes and sat in our assigned seats as the lights dimmed. 6:30. At 6:50pm, the lights came back on because we had just finished 20 minutes of previews. TWENTY MINUTES OF PREVIEWS. I was giggling about this when out comes a theater employee who begins to vend Ben and Jerry's pints. It was like, 20 minutes of previews followed essentially by "Ice cream! Getch'ur ice cream here!". What?! So hilarious. What the heck was going on? I was laughing so hard that I began to cry. Maybe I just needed a good laugh, and this silliness put me overboard, I don't know. To make it even better, the lights then went back down and MORE previews came on. There were so many previews to be shown that they literally had paused to see if you needed ice cream to sustain you through the experience. After about 27 minutes total of previews and ice cream vending, the movie finally began.
Too bad after all of that the movie wasn't even very good. Ah, such an experience though. I wonder if this is typical? I'm going to have to go for Round 2 to see if this happens all the time, but I don't know if I can make it through that many movie trailers again.
