To have cake, and eat it too...

And try not to feel the least bit guilty considering I haven't made it to the gym for two weeks. Or more...??? Let's just stick with two. But it was my birthday and actually, Jason ate half that piece because on Sunday he got up early to bake me a cake so we could take it to our friends house to share during our regular Sunday morning gathering. Mud Cake. Usually, I'm not a cake person -- I prefer apple pie or more specifically these days, lemon meringue pie made with honey instead of sugar and in less of a quantity than the recipe requires -- but this time, I wanted a cake.

So the baby enjoyed its first taste of birthday cake.

Anyway...

So we decided to go to the theatre to watch a movie. I wanted to watch Tim Burton's, Alice in Wonderland, but it was done showing already (only 2 weeks!). I was a little unsure of Clash of the Titans and the other option was How to Tame Your Dragon which I didn't know anything about. I could only envision a theatre full of Chinese parents who brought their kids to expose them to English only to have to translate the entire movie for them because they're too young to read the sub-titles. In short, a very loud theatre. So Jason went to ask out of curiosity, when Iron Man 2 came out. Not knowing the movie's name in Chinese, he did his best to describe in Chinese what can be translated as 'the red man made from iron'. The girl looked at him rather oddly and said 'Ah, its already playing sir.' Like he should've known that. But its not posted on the wall as playing, I point out. But no, after trying his best to describe in Chinese and a short game of charades to make sure she knew which movie he was talking about (oh did I mention sound effects? Only boys can do that.) she says, "yes...that's the one."

Mind you all four ticket vendors where 'helping' at this point.

So we bought tickets. No English on the tickets. "That's odd." Jason notices there's no "# 2" anywhere by the movie title. "Oh well." We're pretty confident that "the red man made from iron" is a pretty apt description not to be confused with anything else. Our main concern was that we forgot to clarify if the movie was in English or only had English subtitles.

The nice thing about buying Chinese movie tickets is that you buy assigned seats. The not so nice thing is that sometimes Chinese don't care and you have to argue with them to get out of your seat. Fortunately, none of that happened and we settle in with our mints (its my birthday and I wasn't going to spend $10 on a tiny dixie cup of Haggen Dass ice-cream...even my cravings have their moral limits). Roll the previews. This is an awful long preview for Clash of the Titans...um this is not Iron Man 2.

So we watched Clash of the Titans. And actually it turned out to be pretty good. And it was in English (always a bonus!). And it was 3D. And some Chinese family still brought their under 6 year old and had to interpret the movie for her but at least it was only one family and they were several rows back. However, we both really enjoyed the movie. A bit graphic but Sam Worthington makes up for it I think. Even if he did keep his shirt on the whole movie.