Welcome to Africa column: (Forgotten) Part Deux: Going to the movies

To add to my last entry about going to the movies and having to choose our seats, which we view as a bizarre practice:

Perhaps even more bizarre, the most unusual part of going to the movies here, is this (and I can’t believe I forgot this and left this out of the last entry):

After all the usual movie previews, on the screen came a picture of the Kenyan flag, and an announcer said, "Let us stand for the national anthem [Kenya's, of course]." It was quite awkward. There were just a few couples in the movie theater, and most of us clearly weren't Kenyans. But out of respect, we all stood for a minute or so while the music played, and then we all sat down, and the movie proceeded. It wasn't our national anthem, but we didn't want to be disrespectful. It was just kind of strange hearing and having to stand for the national anthem in a movie theater, with so few people present, and in the near dark.

Welcome to Africa column: Going to the movies

During the holidays, when Stephen's parents were visiting us in Nairobi, we took advantage of their presence and had them babysit Lexi while we went to a movie one afternoon. We had been to the movies once or twice before here, but not to this particular theater.

When we bought our tickets, they asked us which seats we wanted, and we actually had to choose where we wanted to sit in the theater (on a seating diagram on the cash register's computer screen).

We had encountered this strange practice once before, a few years ago when we were visiting Stockholm, Sweden, but never in Kenya before. We knew that they wouldn't take such seat assignments seriously (this is Kenya, after all, where nothing is very organized), so we just chose seats without thinking about it much. And sure enough, because it was a matinee, there were only a handful of other people in the theater, so we didn't bother to find our chosen seats and just behaved like normal Americans and sat where we wanted to.