Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Movie Night

We tend to focus on the exotic aspects of living in Botswana, but we also have regular, ordinary adventures as well. Last night, we went to see National Treasure: Book of Secrets at the Riverwalk Cinemas. It only has 4 screens and we don't always get the newest movies but we do get most of the really popular movies fairly soon after they are released and it turns out there are a lot of perks to going there. We left work at 5:10 with plenty of time to get to the 5:30 movie.


The usual cost of a movie ticket is 30 Pula (about $5) but on Mondays you can get 2 for 1 tickets. One of the cell phone providers has a code that you send by text message to a phone number that is provided on a poster in their shop window directly across from the movie place. They send you back a text message with a different code that you give to the box office when you buy your movie tickets. And then you only get charged for 1 ticket. So we got 2 tickets for the movie for 30 Pula (about $5).

So when you buy your tickets, you have to pick out your seats and they show you a seating chart which happens to be totally backwards from the layout in the theater. But you get to pick your seats and even if you are the only person in the theater, if you do not sit in the seat that you chose, they will make you move back to your assigned seat. So we carefully chose our seats and paid the 30 Pula for the tickets.



Then we got some popcorn and a coke and some M&Ms for 26.50 Pula (about $4.40) making our movie date total expenses less than $10.





There were about 10 other people watching the movie with us last night. A much larger crowd than usual for a Monday night. We thoroughly enjoyed the movie and had a lovely evening.