Watching a Movie

I've been joking for the past few days about finding a Blockbuster here so we could relax in English. It turns out there's something way better: a DVD store 2 minutes from where we live. They sell DVDs for 8 kaui, so for a little more than a dollar I can own a movie. They have new movies, too, ones that aren't even on video yet. We bought No Country for Old Men and tried to ask to make sure that it would play from our computers. There's some kind of program that lets you play all the pirated DVDs and without it all the ones you buy are useless, so we tried to make sure that this wasn't of that type. She said it would play on our American computers, so we decided to make the leap and pay 8 kuai for it.

We went to one of the apartments that has a large living room and a tv and watched the movie. It even had English subtitles so if it was too hard to hear it wasn't a problem. I don't know how they made the DVD, and I can't ask. The resolution didn't look any different from usual, and the movie played the whole way through without any problems (which is more than I can say about trying to watch movies on our PS2 at home--or movies from Blockbuster, for that matter).

In other news, I finally slept in my own room last night. It turns out that my outlet hadn't broken a second time, but that my heater fan has a safety precaution that if it's tilted at all, which it had been since my rug was right there, then it won't turn on.

I saw some old family friends last night and went to church this morning. Chengdu is organized in a circle, with "ring roads" extending outward from a statue of Mao in the center of the city. We live right off the first ring road in the southern part of the circle, and church and our friends weren't far from the second ring road, so I can walk pretty much everywhere I want to go. Tonight, however, a few of us are going to have dinner at a Chinese family's house. They're rich enough to have paid the 10,000 kuai or whatever it is to get their license to have a car, so I'm interested to see what their house looks like.

Oh, and it's snowing. I talked to some people who have lived here decades and they say that in the twenty years they've been here it's never snowed this heavily. The snow doesn't stick, but it sure was coming down when I was walking this morning.