Harry Potter

So I started the 2nd Hong Kong post yesterday.  And I worked on it some more tonight when we got home from Costco in Busan, but it takes stinking forever for pictures to upload on this website!  So I gave up the idea of finishing that post tonight and decided to finish this post instead.  And really, it's only fair, since I did start this one on January 2nd and just never quite got it completed.

On New Year's Eve, work let us go early at lunch.  So after running by Emart for a cheap bottle of champagne for a toast that night, we decided to head to the movie theater.  Harry Potter had just come out in Korea that month, and we have no idea how long movies run here.  And we really didn't want to miss this one, even if that meant we had to watch it with Korean subtitles.  Which we did.

See the title on the movie poster?  Same style font, but written in Korean characters.  Isn't that so cool?  It actually says "Heh-ree Poe-taw."  Well, they tried, at least.

The theater actually reminded me a little of the old Broadmoor Theater that we used to go to in Baton Rouge when I was a kid.  Only more from the later, dollar-theater years.  The individual theaters were small and the "velvet" seats were well worn, but the foyer was a lot flashier, as you can see in the pictures below.

Buying tickets from the employee who spoke no English wasn't as difficult as we had feared.  We pointed at the movie poster, and she wrote down some times for us to choose from.  Somehow she managed to communicate to us that we needed to pick our seats in the theater, and somehow we managed to tell her which ones.  I've had international plane tickets I didn't get to pick my seats for, but apparently in Korea, you pick your seats at the movies.  The tickets cost about the same as movie tickets in the US, but maybe that's just because it wasn't a Korean movie, I don't know.

But the movie snacks were a lot more affordable than home.  Even if some of them were more interesting.  Check out the chicken in a cup.  Yeah, that's right - chicken... in a cup... with a straw...

See - this kid actually got one!

We eventually figured out that they actually have a separate partition that allows the "Big Hit Chicken," or BHC, as they call it, to rest on top while the drink resides below.  Hence, the straw is for the soft drink, not the chicken.  But we still got normal movie food anyway.  Or at least, as normal is gets.  But at least the movie was really good.  Although, I have to admit, I do hope we're home before the last one comes out!