Par for the Course

Lizzie and I went with Cynch, her husband (Boying), her daughter (Mika) and her nephew (Miko) to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince today.

It was fun to go en masse to the theater (stopping for excellent Greek food beforehand), and thank god for assigned seats, comfy chairs, and massive THX sound. The movie itself was, as far as I can remember, fairly faithful to the 5th Potter novel--lots of teenage romance angst, facistic politics, and dark adult machinations.

After the movie, we stopped by an electronic store and got a cheap DVD player for our apartment (1600.00 pesos, or about $35.00), then had crepes at Cynch's favorite French bistro.

We came home fired up for regular DVD watching--on the TV, in the living room, stretched out on the couch. Until now, Lizzie and I have been huddled up around a laptop (first, her Mac, until it stopped accepting disks, and now my Dell), with headphones in. The good thing is that we can stretch out in a bedroom with the airconditioning on. The bad thing is that, with headphones on, we can't really lie down and get comfortable. And our ears get tired and sore.

The DVD player worked in the store (they test your machines out for you here), hunky dory, but of course once we hooked it up to the TV in our apartment it was a different story. We brought it down to the lobby and hooked it up to the TV here, and it works fine. So it seems that our old apartment TV doesn't recognize anything plugged into it. (This makes me wonder if it's really true that we can't have cable in our apartment--"No hook up, sorry," the manager told me on our first day here--or actually true that the TV in our apartment can't hook up to any cable.)

So we've got DVD (and VCD and MP3 and MP4 and USB) capabilities, but again are prevented from using them.

Sigh.