At the cinema, in Sweden

I live movies. In Japan, going to the cinema is quite expensive compared to Sweden (despite most things being cheaper in Japan than in Sweden). Japanese theaters also tend to have bad sound quality and try to compensate by increasing the volume. In Sweden, sound quality has been great since back when I was in high school (a looong time ago).

I decided to stop by the small local cinema I used to go to when I was in high school. I saw "Crimson Peak", which I liked. Despite it being Friday, I had the theater for 150 almost all to myself (there were three other movie fans there).

Monsters of Film

One of my oldest friends and I used to watch a lot of B-movies when we were young. We usually meet up when I am in Sweden and this time he suggested we could go and see a movie at the "Monsters of Film" festival that I did not know was going on.

Me and my friend right before the free beer arrived

We saw "What we do in the shadows", which was a really funny mockumentary about some vampires sharing and apartment in Wellington. 

Free flavored water

Free beer

This turned out to be the last movie of the festival, so before it started everyone got free beer or free flavored water and some snacks. They wanted to thank everyone for supporting the festival etc. I did not feel that I had supported them that much, but I got a can with raspberry flavored water. 

I did have to work quite a lot to get a ticket, though. The tickets were only sold online. The system did not accept my Japanese credit card, so I tried my old Swedish card that I still have for when visiting Sweden. Then the system prompted me to input an extra verification password to the bank (that would not go to the seller) for extra fraud protection, but I did not have such a password. It said that if you did not have a password you could simply log in to your Internet bank and get one. My Internet bank requires a code key machine for logging in, which I keep at home. Going home to Sapporo to get it did not seem like a great solution. I tried another Japanese card I have, which was considered suspicious (because the address of the card owner was not in Sweden) but that the system said: "possibly might be accepted after manual inspection". The manual inspection only happens when people are at work, but 16 hours later, my transaction finally went through and I could pay for my ticket.

My friend had a sword at home. Possibly to use against zombie outbreaks.

I also got to meet a friend of my friend who turned out to be a movie geek (in the best possible way). He apparently owns around 8000 DVDs. Where do you even store so many DVDs? We talked about strange niche market Japanese movies for a while. Good times.

3D glasses

I went to see "The Hobbit" at one of our cinemas in Sapporo yesterday. The show it in 2D, in 3D, and in 3D but not dubbed to Japanese (with Japanese subtitles instead). Since I am fairly sure my Hobbit related vocabulary in Japanese is severely lacking, I wanted to see it in English, and bought a ticket for the "not dubbed, 3D" version.

I also had to buy a pair of 3D glasses, which were very cheap (100 yen, compared to the 2100 yen for the ticket). They had some different ones to choose from, clip-ons for people with glasses, tiny ones for children, and the standard ones that I bought.

I liked the movie. Very pretty visuals, and I loved the book when I read it when I was around 11 so  I like the story too.

On my way home, someone in the escalator said: "Oh, it's Jonas" behind me. It turned out to be one of my friends, who I have not seen in over a month. He had been having dinner with his girlfriend near the cinema I went to.