Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Legal and Living on the Edge

Only five-and-a-half months later, we are all official, legal residents of Duesseldorf. We had to take the train downtown this morning to present our faces and the proper paperwork in order to get our passports appropriately adjusted and become officially registered. No word yet on when we will get our check for having a child (the birth rate is really low here).

So now that we're proper and official, I decided life was getting to tame and took a walk on the wild side. Went with some girl friends to the Wednesday night Cinestar Sneak Preview. Every Wednesday, the movie theater in Oberkastle (a neighborhood of Duesseldorf--kind of like Back Bay in Boston) shows a movie in the original version (OV), meaning in English. The deal is, you don't know what the movie is until you've paid your money and sat down. Pretty risky, I know. Actually, it only costs 4.50 euro, so if it's something awful, like Saw 3, you can just leave.

We saw Dreamgirls, which I'd actually seen in the states over Christmas, but was fine with seeing again. It was a different experience altogether. In the states, everyone in the theater totally bought in to the whole musical thing--the big productions, people randomly breaking into song, fading spotlights, etc. People even clapped at the finish of one of the really show-stopper songs. Here, people kind of giggled whenever someone broke into song in a place where they would normally just be talking. In fact, the longer the movie went on, the more people laughed. Musical theater must not be big here.

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