Utrecht

Woke this morning after another night of deep sleep, weird dreams, punctuated by waking once or twice. Took a shower, got dressed, and either bent over wrong, stood up wrong, or whatever I did wrong pinched an old lower back injury. (Fell off a waterfall in Thailand over 20 years ago. It’s a good story but not as exciting as you might think; maybe I should embellish it sometime. But I digress.) As a result of said wrongness, I have spent a good portion of the day saying, “Ow.”

After showering, dressing, and wronging, my brother directed me here,

which he said was just up the street from the grocery store. It wasn’t. It was actually a few blocks up and several over plus the few wrong turns I made searching for it. Ow.

Had a delightful breakfast of coffee, OJ, and a bagel with cream cheese and strawberry jam. Then walked the correct way back to the house. Ow.

The return home is when I felt really jet lagged for the first time so thought it would be a good idea to go see this

because I didn’t want to nap and jeopardize my adjustment to local time, and I enjoy going to movies in other countries; when I’m in them, not like a regular vacation thing.

Ow.

In Taipei I saw “The Money Pit” that was in English and subtitled in Chinese, which made it both awkward and hilarious when I’d laugh several seconds before most of the Taiwanese audience.

Similarly in Spain I watched “There’s Something About Mary”, at an outdoor theater, which was dubbed in Spanish with English subtitles. The enjoyable bit that time was that the Spaniards in the audience didn’t get the hair gel joke, nor had any idea who Brett Favre was! (I’m assuming you’d get the joke and know him.) While in Thailand I saw a movie I don’t recall, maybe because of the waterfall incident, but I do remember the lights dimming, some music playing, and the audience standing in unison…for their national anthem.

Ow.

Back to this

I tried to use the ticket kiosks b/c even though they were in Dutch, (but not cahoots), I figured, “It’s just tickets, how hard could it be?”

After getting my ticket from the cashier I headed up the stairs toward theater #7. On the way I walked through the concession stand, which is really more of a convenience store kind of thing, grabbed my snax, paid, and walked to my movie.

Huge theater, comfy seats, and virtually no one else there. Awesome. Seriously, maybe 15 people. As expected there were a ton of commercials before the film, one of which had a scene with a couple, um, coupling, didn’t expect that.

Also unexpected was intermission. Seemingly out of nowhere the screen went dark. When it came back on, there was a 10 minute countdown timer. WTF?

Ow.

The movie was great, even though there were Dutch subtitles, though shifting in my seat periodically in an attempt to get comfortable was not great.

On the walk home I passed a gentleman playing Christmas music on an accordion, saw this

and wondered, What’s ‘tegen’ mean? It means “against”.

Arrived back at the house, succumbed to a nap, the movie excursion was over 3 hours, then woke in time to join my brother on a bike ride to Beers & Barrels for dinner. I had tacos.

Ow.