Saturday night at the movies

Homemade popcorn in the vending machine at Cinema Verdi

I'm in Barcelona now, and my airbnb household & I have been a bit sick with colds. After resting at home all day Saturday, and craving a little normalcy - a night at the movies - I ventured outdoors down the convivial Carrer de Verdi (the street I'm staying on in the sweet neighbourhood of Gracia) to get some empanadas and go to see the new Woody Allen film: To Rome with Love. Susanna, my host, recommended the popcorn, and above you can see how I found it - for only 1.00 Euro, modestly-sized homemade bags of popcorn, without the usual yellow chemical coating: basically, excellent.

After four months travelling now, my brain is tired from not knowing yet trying to communicate in foreign languages. I got here from Paris and after a week have finally managed to stop saying 'oui' and switch to 'si'. It was the same when I got to Paris of course - I was saying 'si' instead of 'oui' after July in Italy. Half of Saturday's movie was spoken in Italian, being set in Rome and with half a cast of locals, and the subtitles were Spanish, so I cobbled together the gist from the combo of hearing Italian & reading Spanish (what little I can recognise), but of course I missed all the jokes. I'll have to watch it again when I get home. Watching the film was like undertaking the same kind of work I'm doing each day in the real world here: codebreaking! So my night at the movies wasn't quite the normalcy I was after. But still glad I went. I got to see Rome again at least...