A day at the movies

My boss invited me to go to the movies and dinner with her and her two sons. The boys wanted to see Wallace and Gromit: The Tale of the the Wererabbit. I don't know if it was coincidence or by design that two other families with kids that I teach were also at the movie. The little girl that thinks I'm an angel, Claire, was there.

There was assigned seating in this theater, so I was sitting with my boss and her boys. Claire and another one of my students, Sophia, demanded that they be allowed to break the rules and sit next to me. So for the entire movie the girls were poking me in my side to let me know they wanted to give me some popcorn. The movie itself was pretty good. The jokes were mainly 'plays on words.' No one was laughing so I don't think the jokes translated well. For example, at one point in the movie Wallace said he was going somewhere because he had a hunch, the camera panned to very old hunchback who said, "So do I."

One thing really surprised me at the movie. I was at a childrens' movie and the majority of the audience was under the age of 12. The first thing shown on the screen was a commercial for alcohal. The commercial was very long and had a man and a woman making out for most of it. The next preview was for a movie that had a middle aged man chasing around women in their early twenties who were wearing bikinis. I wanted to cover the eyes of the kids around me. The next and final preview was for a drama. It showed a man being chased through a factory by men with baseball bats. The men catch him and beat him to unconciousness. It then showed the beaten man get up, go home, and get a gun. These three things were the only things shown before the movie.

After the movie, everyone went to Pizza Hut. Claire and Sophia again demanded I sit next to them. A few differences between American Pizza Huts and this Korean Pizza Hut really stood out. First, salad plates are shared by the entire table. And in order to satisfy everyone, many different kinds of salad are heaped together. The salad bowl had iceberg lettuce with Thousand Island on top. The dressing dripped down to the next layer of corn, which in turn mixed with the pasta salad. On the bottom, the potato salad tasted more like the stuff on top of it than it did potato salad. When the pizza arrived I did not recognize any of the toppings. I was told that one of the toppings was paprika, and another topping was sweet mushy potato. The pizza was good.

There was plenty of dinner conversation too. Normally, it is impolite to talk much while you eat, but I've noticed that when Koreans eat at Western restaurants they talk a lot more. The talking was all in Korean except for the "Teacher Raymond"s that peppered the conversation. Everytime "Teacher Raymond" was used in a statement it was followed by head-nodding, laughter, or everyone turning to look at me. I'm used to this now, so I ignored it and conitinued to eat dill pickle, pineapple, and kidney bean mixture in the salad bowl.

The kids I teach love to give me food and candy. I got tons popcorn at the movie and plenty of after-dinner Pizza Hut mints. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention this. I always think it's funny when things are translated from one language to another then back to the original. I was talking to my boss's youngest son, Danny, about Harry Potter. I asked him which books had he read. He told me that he had read The Magician's Rock (I assumed this was The Sorceror's Stone) and The Fire Cup (The Goblet of Fire).