Sunday, July 01, 2007

Shred a Third...

of my weekly salary is what I did last weekend so we could all go see a movie. Last Sunday, we herded the crew into the mini-bus and headed to the Cinemaxx in Mannheim to see Shrek the Third. I've spoken about the movie going experience in another post, having taken Robert to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3. In case you don't remember or didn't read the post, I fell asleep and Robert asked to leave early anyway.
Well, I fell asleep again but this time the kiddies seemed to dig the movie. While the outragious prices are the same here and in the States, there are some differences in the movie going experience here.
One of the most remarkable things we saw, however, had nothing to do with the theater or the movie. We parked in the theater's parking garage and, upon leaving, noticed an accessibility "improvement" that had been made to the stairs. It is really a remarkable feat of engineering to not only address an annoying problem for handicapped folks (stairs) but to turn it into a thrill ride. The picture does a poor job of showing just how steep the incline was (especiall on the upper steps).
As I mentioned before, you get an assigned seat at theaters here. I think you might pay a bit more for better seats. I believe our tickets came to about 6 Euros each (no credit cards, thank you).
What movie going experience would be complete without buying a 55 gallon drum of Diet Coke? Somehow this picture failed to adequately capture the dimensions of their largest size. Not even in Texas have I seen a Coke that huge.
A really cool feature of this theater is an apparently acid trip-induced lounge where you can wile away the hours before or after the feature. Having already slept through the movie, I waited patiently while B and the kids took it easy for a few.

On a totally unrelated note, later that evening the sky took on a deep yellow hue that I've never seen before. It looked like someone put a lemon-color filter over the city of Heidelberg. I took the shot below of an accompanying rainbow (although it doesn't capture the freaky color outdoors).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Those ramps are really more for baby carriages/strollers than for wheelchairs. Although of course wheelchairs can use them, too, but as you noticed the incline is quite steep.