Movie Day

Wednesday (January 18) was not a good day. 

As already mentioned, our mobile phone provider, Three UK, had screwed up, making it impossible for me to top up my pay-as-you-go plan. Result: I had no phone all day - no voice, text or data. This should have been nothing more than a minor glitch, but turned out to have unanticipated consequences.

Our plan had been to go to Cines Babel on the other side of the Turia in the university district to see Living, a new Bill Nighy film, at 4 o'clock. Cines Babel plays movies in their original language with Spanish subtitles. We set out a little after 3 with the idea of biking to the theatre, which was supposedly about a ten-minute ride away. 

When we got to the Valenbisi station, though, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get a bike because I use an app on my phone to choose a bike and release it. Karen uses a Metro card associated with her account. I also have a Metro card so tried to set it up at the Valenbisi station by keying in my phone number and PIN. But I guess, the Valenbisi system needs to ping the phone to confirm my identity, and of course it couldn’t.

I don’t think you could live on this side of the Atlantic without a reliable mobile phone. Access plans are so much cheaper here than at home, though, and even pay-as-you-go packages include data, which they don’t at home.

By the time we’d pfaffed around with the bikes, it was far too late to walk all the way, so we gave up the plan. We’d only chosen today to go to the movies because Cines Babel is slightly cheaper on Wednesdays. So we went for a walk down the Gran Via and over to Colon and home. It was sunny, but cool. The pixel boards said 17C, but with the breeze, it felt quite a bit cooler. 

A couple of hours after we got back, Three UK finally cleared up the problems it was having with its online top-up system and I was able to get my phone back up and running. The new plan was to go to the movies the next day - if all goes well. Nothing much else planned for the day.

*

Thursday wasn’t quite a write-off, but not a great day either, especially for Karen. That said, she did make a very nice drawing of a mouse as part of one of her online art classes in the morning.

It was still cool and breezy - in fact, the coolest day yet. It was supposed to go up to 15C, but never made it. It was only 9, according to the Weather Channel, when I went out for a fast walk around 10:30. 

I followed a new route that took me over to a newer section of the city on the other side of Avenida de Peris y Valero. I marched all the way to the Turia on a long boulevarded street with completely anonymous boring architecture. Built in the 1970s, I’d guess. The route also took me past a place that appears to be a prison - solid 20-foot walls with barbed wire along the top - which I think we discovered last time was a holding facility for illegal immigrants and refugees. I ended up at the Turia right across from the Reina Sofia Palau de les Arts, part of the City of Arts and Sciences. Then I got a tiny bit lost coming back and had to resort to GPS.

The agenda for the day was lunch out - yes, another lunch out; we’re making up for months of not going out - and then the Bill NIghy movie, Living, at Cines Babel. We walked over to the Ruzafa market and found the restaurant that was closed the other day when we went looking - Tasqueta de Mercat. It was open today and they had a menu del dia for 13.90 euros that included one drink and dessert. 

It’s a bit noisy with a lot of hard surfaces. The kitchen is visible from the dining area. That kind of place: bustling. Our server was a cheerful young woman who spoke very good English. I asked her where she’d learned her English, thinking she’d say she’d spent time in America. She looked, and sounded, Chicano. But no, she said she’d learned at school here and by watching English-language media. She seemed genuinely pleased that we complimented her English.

Karen had a Russian salad for starters and ribs with oven-fried potatoes. I had a very fresh and tasty chicken salad with a vaguely curry-ish mayo-based dressing, followed by a very good - if under-done by Canadian standards - hamburger, served with patatas con bravas. We both had the brownie for dessert and a second glass of wine. All the food was fresh and tasted really good. The service was excellent. And the bill was still only about 34 euros. 

We just marvel at how restaurants can serve such high-quality food here for so little. At a restaurant in Canada, a meal of this quality - if you could find it - would cost at least $75. This was a little over $50. One way they do it is by keeping servings small, but the servings at all the places we’ve eaten here have been plenty for us. I think a lot of it is that there is a culture of going out for meals here, people are less likely to tolerate mediocre fare - and there’s a lot of competition.

It felt too cool to ride bikes and we had lots of time, so we walked to the cinema. It’s a great Cineplex-style theatre with five “salas.” There were a few people ahead of us buying tickets but we were in fairly quickly. The tickets came to a little bit less than we pay at the repertory theatre we go to at home.

The room our movie was in was the size of one of the smaller rooms at the original Cineplexes in Canada. The seating appeared to be new and was very comfortable, but the room wasn’t raked at all and the seat backs were very high. If anybody had sat in front of us, we wouldn’t have been able to see. Luckily the theatre was almost empty.

When the movie started, I found myself straining a little to hear. The volume they play movies at in Canadian cinemas is insanely loud, but here it was way too low. I speculated that it’s because they assumed most of the audience was reading the film anyway so they didn’t need to have it higher. In any case, I immediately worried that Karen wouldn’t be able to hear. 

I was right to be worried. I asked her after we came out if she liked the movie. Her response: “As much as I could hear of it, which was practically nothing.” Oh, dear! And she’s saying she doesn’t want to chance going to another movie there and running into the same thing. It’s particularly unfortunate too because this was such a lovely movie. 

Bill Nighy plays a faceless bureaucrat in a municipal office in early 1960s London who discovers he’s dying of cancer and only has a few months to live. It inspires him to take stock of his life and to start living - hence the title.

He first bunks off work for a few weeks, takes a jaunt to a seaside resort where he hooks up with a reprobate writer and trolls the bars with him. Then he comes back to the city and by chance meets a lively young woman who had been one of his employees but has now moved on to another job. He strikes up a friendship with her.

He finally goes back to work, a changed man. He surprises his employees by taking the bull by the horns and finally pushing through an application that had been shuffling back and forth from department to department. It’s a citizen petition to create a children’s playground in a bombed out building site in central London. He sees it completed just before he dies.

It’s a sad, but uplifting movie with some very fine performances, especially Bill Nighy’s. None of his trademark lascivious cackling here. It’s based on a famous Kurosawa movie called Ikiru, which I saw when I was in my 20s but thought then was hopelessly boring. The story had a little more resonance this time. Funny that. 

We had talked about taking the tube home - the Aragon Metro stop was only a few minutes away - but we decided to walk. The sun was lovely on the building along the Turia park, but it was dark by the time we got back to Ruzafa. We did a shop at the Consum across the street and then settled in for the evening.

This was the second day I’d taken zero pictures of this beautiful city, which is shameful. In order to scratch the photo itch, I went back to some stuff I'd been working on before we left home - experiments in multiple-exposure photography - and did some finish work on a few. Here are a couple - just to relieve the textyness of this post.