Our New Cinema

I think I've written before about how they were putting in a new cinema across the street from us. Well they finally finished it. The "mall" that it is in was to be completed in November and well the "mall" was finished but with only a few stores open. And when they opened the mall, they put a sign where the cinema is saying it would open January 2007. It didn't open by the end of January, much to our surprise...ha, we knew it wouldn't open. But it finally did open a couple of weeks ago! Unfortunately it is run by the same company that owns the other cinema located about 10 minutes away (5 minutes without traffic, yes we have two cinemas that close together and they are the only cinemas in all of Tanzania) and so they aren't competing, meaning the prices are the same, they just show different movies. Which can be a good thing because that means we will have the ability to see more of the movies that are shown in America, but then we think about how long they run each movie and most of the time it's only for two weeks so it may be difficult to go and see every movie we want to see. It just opened though so we'll see if they lengthen the amount of time they show a movie. None of that really is the point of this blog though. Last weekend we decided to go to the new cinema and see The Prestige. It was a pretty good movie and well I didn't know what was going to happen, Whit says she figured it out, but then her brain does work a little faster than mine does. So we got there after a 2 minute drive to the place, 2 minutes only because we had to open the gate to get out of our "driveway". We walked in and looked around a bit...the "lobby" area is a little smaller than the other cinema but it does look a lot nicer. We got some drinks and headed into our theater. There's carpet on the floor and up the wall and that's something you hardly see around here...carpet. It smells all nice and new. They had stadium seating and the seats were comfortable...they didn't recline any though. It was all really nice...we felt like we walked back into America. But we were brought back to Africa when the fire alarm decided to go off in the middle of the movie. Whit and I looked at each other and were like should we leave? We decided not to, that if there really was a fire someone would come and get us out or we would smell the smoke. Some people did decide to leave and were gone for a few minutes so we thought about leaving again, but they walked back in as we were thinking that. The alarm continued to go and we continued to watch the movie. Every once in a while we chuckled at the fact that the alarm was going and we still sat there watching the movie. About 30 minutes after the alarm started going some people came in to work on it. What did they do you ask? Did they turn it off? Nope! Why would you do that when you can just muzzle it so it's not as annoying?!? Shortly after that, well shortly meaning 15 minutes or so later the alarm stopped and we finished the movie in peace. This is Africa and what it can be like living here. Random things that would drive you crazy if you were in America don't bother you at all here. It is its own world and I love it...most of the time.