Day 240

 

I'm not sure if you can tell, but those are all Harry Potter posters hanging up and down the ceiling of the Umeda train station. 

But I just watched Harry Potter movie last night and it was great fun. An interesting tidbit about movie watching in Japan. So there are a good number of restaurants and recreational places that offers a "Ladies" discount price, the movie theaters being one of them. The standard movie admission ticket is an ridiculous 1800 yen ($21.50 USD), but usually every Wednesday is "Ladies' Day" where if you're a lady, an admission ticket costs 1000 yen ($11.95 USD). I usually don't worry too much about trying to schedule watching movies on Wednesday since there's a movie theater chain that offers a foreign student discount of the same amount, and is also applicable any day of the week. 

However, sometimes when I go to watch the movies with Nick, I'll get a Ladies' Day ticket and a foreign student ticket, give Nick the foreign student ticket, and use the Ladies' Day ticket for myself. However, for Harry Potter, the best time slot ended up being at another theater where I wasn't sure if they had a foreign student discount or not. I went to the theater in the morning to buy the tickets and when I went to the counter to ask, the staff member just started saying since it was Ladies' Day that I should just buy that ticket. I got annoyed and was about to be late for class so I just told her to give me two Ladies' Day tickets. 

So now we had the problem of how to get Nick into the theater with a Ladies' Day ticket since I wasn't sure how closely they would check our tickets. So what did we end up doing? While walking up to the movie staff and giving them our tickets, talked loudly in English as to distract and intimidate them from confronting us. 

And yes, it worked.

Mom, Dad, aren't you proud of me?

By the by, wasn't the animated sequence of the Three Brothers, beautifully awesome? Useless tidbit: the guy who directed that sequence is Swiss animation director Ben Hibon, and just recently signed to direct a Peter Pan remake.