A Cinema-tastic Experience

The kids are still on holidays (roll on Monday!) so we're trying to find ways of entertaining them in Delhi. It's not that easy. There aren't many things to do here. There are no parks to go to, no walks to go on. We can go shopping - Thalia could shop as an Olympic sport - but Keir would rather go to the dentist than aimlessly wander around yet another mall. After the first couple of hours, I'm with Keir. And if we stay at home, Keir is happy (nay, ecstatic) to spend all day on the Wii, but Thalia gets bored, and I don't want him in front of the computer or TV for the whole day. And there are only so many ways you can spin the phrase "handwriting practice"...no matter how much he'd benefit from it.

So last week we thought we'd try the cinema. We looked up the listings in the newspaper and decided on Madagascar 2. Bizarrely for a country which does NOTHING early, all the cinemas showing Madagascar only had one session, and that was at half past ten. As the current time was past half past ten, that meant another day of handwriting practice...

So yesterday we got out act together early and went to the cinema in the DT Mega Mall. From the outside you'd not expect much from this cinema. The foyer didn't have wall to wall plush carpeting, in fact the ceiling had that open industrial look reminiscent of Ikea. But no flatpacked furniture, or meatballs, obviously...

Stepping inside the auditorium an usher told us where to find our seats. Second row from the back, otherwise known as the row they assigned to everyone else. Not wanting to sit with the other six families that got up early, we asked if we could sit in any of the other 24 rows. The usher seemed a little surprised, but we're western, so he said we could.

The seats were large and very comfortable. They had a pull down armrest, and you could recline them. They were the best cinema seats I've ever sat in.

We sat through one grainy ad for Coca Cola and then the movie began. At the advertised time. There weren't 20 minutes of trailers for movies we didn't want to see, no Pearl and Dean animation, no ad for the tandoori restaurant next door to the cinema. Really quite refreshing.

After about 45 minutes, in the middle of a scene, the movie stopped. The lights went up. The curtain closed. Keir looked confused. He wasn't the only one. The last time I saw a movie with an intermission was "A Passage to India". That movie was so long it needed one, but Madagascar 2 had remembered it was a kids movie, and it was tight. Maybe Indian kids don't have great bladder control... People stood up and went into the foyer to buy more food. And just as Keir (always hungry) was asking if we could join them, an attendant came and took our order. So we had popcorn delivered to our seat! Brilliant!!

The movie started again, just as abruptly as it had stopped. And it was fantastic. All in all a great morning out. Because the movie started so early into the session time, we were out by midday! So time for handwriting practice after all...