A post from Nairobi: Saturday night at the movies

Well Saturday night at 8 o'clock
I know where I'm gonna go
I'm gonna pick my baby up
And take her to the picture show
Saturday Night at the Movies
The Drifters

So granted it was my literal baby and not the other kind, but yes there we were. In a movie theater. On a Saturday night.

Popcorn - check
Sodas - check
Front row seats - check.

A real movie theater! Plushy seats, surround sound, the works. Cool. Neither Ashes nor I could really adjust to the fact that we were actually going to watch a movie that was not:

• bought in Osu from the 'open source' vendors. This is usually accompanied by fingers crossed and hoping when you get home that the quality was good and that there was in fact a movie on the damn CD!
• a hundred and one re-run of some movie on DSTV that you were so tiered of watching - but yes, it was either that or the open source movie guys;
• a movie that we had bought from the non-open source community that we had also watched a million and one times before.

Get the point? There are no movie theaters in Accra! Perhaps I need to re-phrase that. None that I would go to. There is one that I pass on the way down to Makola that seems to be showing all these kung-fu flicks, but yes, not my scene. Then there are also the 'converted' houses where you can rent a room and your own big screen TV, but again not the same. I do wonder about some of these set ups though. Remember seeing a flyer once where there was the 'red room', 'blue room' etc. Made me wonder what exactly was to happen in those rooms. Hmmm.

The last time we went to the movies in fact was all of two years ago before we moved to Ghana. The idea of a movie theater (or cinema as they call it here) was something that we always took for granted.

Back to the movie. So there we were, tickets bought for Hancock - definitely not one of Will Smith's best movies. Seats in the third row - a move we would soon regret. We were ready! Had the usual previews of upcoming shows, the national anthem (yes stood for that too) and the movie started.

About 20 mins in I realized that I was feeling quite nauseous. There was just something about seeing Will Smith's pores super-enlarged in live and living colour that was unsettling my stomach. Usually seeing any part of him does unsettle me, but no, not like this. It got progressively worse as the action scenes flashed by in a blur of colour. I just couldn't understand. Was it something I ate? I thought back to what I had for breakfast and lunch. No couldn't be.

And then Ashes said she was also feeling sick.

Panic! Argh! We were allergic to the movies!

Ok, of course not.

Remembered feeling like this once before when trying to play a video game and thought, this must be related to where we are sitting. Of course googled later to see what I could find and found that we were actually suffering from simulator sickness which is a bit similar to motion sickness in terms of how one feels. It's actually quite interesting. In a nutshell, a computer-driven virtual environment can fool the body enough to cause some of its most basic support systems to be confused. Basically what happens is that your eyes think you are moving but your body is stationary. This fools the nervous system and causes this disorientation and confusion. Sitting in the third row with our faces literally plastered to the screen must have been a contributing factor.

Of course we sat out the movie! Stumbled out out into the lobby afterwards looking like we were both victims of substance abuse. Just thankful that it wasn't one of those epic movies that would have taken three hours or more! Not sure if we would have survived.

Moral of the story: we need a cinema in Accra!
Withdrawal from such an activity will manifest itself in various ways once the 'subject' is re-exposed to the phenomena after a long period in absentia.

Will be better prepared this time - will take seats all the way at the back (hmm, note to self, wonder if we could suffer from vertigo?) or at least somewhere in the middle. But yes, will go to the movies again with my baby before we leave Nairobi.