Breaking Dawn 2 in Myanmar

Extra day in Myanmar with nothing to do? Obvious choice is to see a teen vampire movie (or more accurately, the fourth in a series of teen vampire movies) in a grand theater. I love movie-going in different places!  Noah and I saw SkyFall in India and were struck by:

1.       The rigidly enforced assigned seating, despite being 2 of 10 people in a 200 person theater
2. The national anthem movie that played before the show- it took us a really long time to figure out that it was supposed to be a touching scene of deaf and mentally retarded kids at a school singing the national anthem.
3.   During every scene in which a character had a cigarette, a big warning on the bottom of the screen appeared, -- the hazards of tobacco.
4.  People not only do not silence their phones, they answer their phones and hold entire conversations on their phones during the movie.

In Myanmar the theater was this grand building with a heavy golden curtain that dramatically parted right before the projection. When everyone rose to sing the national anthem, several people rose right in front of the projection so you got to see the national flag as well as the silhouettes of several people’s heads.

The advertisements before the previews were literally on a Powerpoint presentation, complete with swipes in between each one. They were mostly written in Burmese which is a language that looks like curls going in many different directions. However, occasionally, they must have run into a word that doesn’t translate well so the ad looked like this “Curly curly curly vibration mode curly curly curly “ (guessing this was the ‘silence your phone’ message which was of course, totally disregarded). Another one read “curly curly curly, personal responsibility, curly curly curly”.