Big night on the town

I promised Kaitlyn we’d go see Wall-E today. It was showing in town last night, but I have a cold that is just making me miserable and I was in no mood to go to a movie. So thinking I’d feel better overnight (not so much), I promised we’d go today.

Several people had told us that Wall-E is a pretty good movie to see in French, since there is so little dialog in the first place. So… what the heck.

I suggested taking the tram downtown, since there’s a stop right by the movie theater where we were going. OK, so I don’t know which tram line or how to exactly get to it… I could have looked that part up. Bill didn’t want to take the tram siting an unfamiliarity with it. Which is funny for a person who’s navigated his way through the world’s busiest train station in Japan; you’d think that the tram line here with its three lines would be a snap. He was driving, though, so we skipped the tram. But when we got in the vicinity of the parking garage (which is, admittedly, attached to the movie theater) Bill panicked. He absolutely freaked out about parking there. We’d passed a sign saying the garage was full, but that sign clearly looked broken because it listed no information for any other garage in all of Grenoble. I finally convinced him to circle the block and try to park in the garage. Voila! There were lots and lots of spaces. Then we got to the ticket counter and Bill asked me how to ask for the tickets. I said, I don’t know, just say “two adults and one child.” I figured it would be pretty obvious what we were buying. So Bill said “Fine. You do the talking. “ What does he think I do all day? Uh, the talking.

The theater was small but nice. It was stadium seating and each seat had a big holder in the arm rest for popcorn boxes, not just drinks. Nice touch. Surprising touch for a place where people allegedly don’t snack.

We did enjoy the movie. And I didn’t understand every word of the limited dialog, but enough to understand what was going on. I was a little annoyed that a newspaper headline that obviously gave some important information had been changed to French and wasn’t up on the screen long enough for me to decipher. Ah, well, c’est la vie.

After the movie, I again suggested we take the tram to a spot to get dinner. Bill didn’t want to walk. Hadn’t brought a jacket (I asked him when we left if he needed one). Kaitlyn really wanted to walk and I thought the tram was a good compromise. But we settled on going to a Chinese restaurant that isn’t near a tram anyway, so we drove. Parking was awful, it took forever to find a space. Then when we got to the restaurant we discovered why I haven’t been able to get through on the phone to make a reservation: it isn’t there anymore. There are two more Chinese restaurants on that block and Kaitlyn insisted we go in the one with a fish tank she could see from outside. That isn’t usually a good way to chose a restaurant, but it was actually very good. I did think that the woman at the table next to us who got up four times to go to the bathroom seemed a little odd… and at one point they put so many diners in the room you actually couldn’t walk past the middle of it (which is where our table was)… but otherwise it was very good. Kaitlyn behaved because she knew it was vital since she was the one who had insisted we go to a restaurant in the first place.

All in all a good night. But next time… I’m taking the tram. And making Bill take along a jacket.

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