Peter Moore remembers going to the cinema in Tanzania

Batman

Man should try everything once, apart from incest and Morris dancing. Well, this is the point of view I was dragged around to, when someone suggested that we go and watch ‘Batman’.

I am not a particularly fierce critic of Batman. In fact I distinctly remember wearing my y-fronts outside of my trousers during my early years in a vain attempt to gain superpowers myself. The problem was that we were in a dustbowl Tanzanian safari city that had only recently unveiled its first sit down toilet.

But, located in the bustling uptown area (possibly not far for the aforementioned toilet) had been located a cinema promising to show ‘Batman Begins’ - 6pm. There were seven of us, and we came to the consensus that we would abandon the current evening plan (bottle of beer - bottle of beer - bolognaise pizza - beer) and instead go and watch the film.

Gorbechov’s Taxi

I wasn’t quite sure was to expect, I imagined that it might be cheaper than £6.50 but I conceded that you might not be able to buy popcorn in two different sizes. Once we had bounced down the street in our Mercedes (which I fancied at some point during the early 1980s may have belonged to someone from the Gorbechov administration) it transpired that I was right. Arriving at the cinema a man popped out from behind a table and promptly charged us 1,500 Tanzanian Shillings (70p) each whilst greeting us with a generous yellow-teethed smile.

The first thing that struck me as we passed through the double doors was that the room was big; the screen was dwarfing us from a distance of 30m and I immediately began to feel like a post-op Mike TV. But before I could begin to comprehend fully the size of the screen, the smell arrived. It was as if this geographical area had been for centuries a favoured urinal for a local herd of stubborn elephants, and they would be damned if they were going to change their habits merely because a cinema had been constructed there.

I struggled on through the ammonia-thick air, my eyes watering by now in the dark, sitting down with a clunk on a British Rail era wooden seat. Batman had already begun. It was quite difficult to see what was happening due to the fact that the film had been expanded to fill the enormous screen (approx. five times normal size), at first glance Michael Caine looked as if he had been inflated by Harry Potter.

Hakuna Matata

Alongside us in the cinema was a man sitting alone what seemed a few hundred meters in front of us. He was straining his head in odd directions and it soon became apparent that he was having the same difficulty in hearing anything that I was. Two small speakers were located at either end of the room and I am pretty sure to say that at least one of them must have been inhabited by a woodpecker. Years of huffing and puffing had seemingly burnt out these poor, small speakers and no matter in which direction I or my friend in front tilted our heads, we could barely make out what (the forty foot wide) Michael Caine was saying.

But, using the ethic of ‘Hakuna Matata’ that I had been building up during the past several weeks, I thought that all would be well due to the film being subtitled in English. Fantastic. Or not. It soon became evident that the translator was a) Of a similar level of English than I am of Welsh or b) On LSD. This fact did take a small amount of time to become apparent, but when the young (but seemingly bloated) Batman was audibly told by one of his benefactors ‘Good news’, the titles at the bottom of the screen read ‘Berghausen will suffer.’

I was by now getting very confused. Staring at the bloated screen and trying to decipher the obviously coded subtitles: who was this Berghausen fellow? For five minutes we sat hearing subtitles that resembled a jumble sale of the English language, such as; ‘Bring cake fast’, and ‘hope forgets carrots’.

Not worth it

It was at this point a good twelve minutes through that the audible language changed. Of course no one realised this immediately as the subtitles continued to whir along eccentrically: ‘News of dangerous cement’ etc. But after a group meeting and some hard listening we determined that the language had changed: Russian?

Our suspicions were confirmed when the fellow in front, jumped up and made for the door. We followed in defeat, only to find when we got there the yellow toothed attendant employing the same persistence we had become used to with the souvenir peddlers outside.

‘No worries, sorry man’, he kept repeating, shepherding us back towards our seats, determined for us to enjoy a complete film. ‘Bad copy’, he added shrugging his shoulders.

It was then that ‘War of the Worlds’ began. Unfortunately by this time the front two speakers had shorted, and the gentleman in front of us (who had also been escorted back to his seat) had burst into fits of laughter, which didn’t particularly add to the atmosphere. This time I reasoned the language was more Germanic and as the subtitles appeared it was for the first time that they read faultless English: ‘Sometimes it is just not worth it.’

By Ryan Craggs

Having grown up in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, I guess you could say I lived a somewhat sheltered life. About the only real crime I can remember touching me was someone stealing my dad’s hubcap when I was 14. What anyone could possibly want one hubcap for, I’ll never know. Perhaps a Buick hubcap pendant necklace?

Regardless, I think it’s pretty safe to say that most people who live in Madrid for any period of time have experienced robbery of some sort. Before anyone comes to the city, whether for study abroad or just for a vacation, one of the warnings is almost certainly to watch your belongings. It’s common sense, but it goes way beyond that. I mean, I even saw a guy walk into Café y Te just to steal a paper bag left unattended. I’m pretty sure all he got was a magazine or newspaper, but it just goes to show everything is fair game.

Professionals

Look, if thieves weren’t good at what they did, they wouldn’t be around. Knowing that, you may think you’ve got things under control, but it’s not always true. A friend of mine recently recanted how she got her purse stolen on the Metro…from underneath her thigh. She was literally sitting on her purse and someone managed to get it from under her. Of course she was in tears after it happened, but aside from a little cash gone and having to cancel some credit cards, nothing too important was gone. That’s the feeling I get anyway—I’m a guy, so I have no idea what women keep in their purses.

Bye bye wallet

When I studied in Madrid in the Spring of 2006, I was uber-paranoid about my wallet. I started putting it in my front pocket all the time along with my abono. I don’t like cramming my wallet, pens, change, keys, Chapstick and all that junk into one place, but so be it. Then one night on the town (and a slightly enebriated one at that) I put it in my back pocket while sitting on the stairs, waiting for the metro to open in Sol. My roommate and I got chatted up by a group of guys also waiting for the metro…one thing leads to another, and while one of the guys is talking to me, his buddy sits on my other side and slips my wallet out. I realized about 2 minutes later when I was going to enter the metro and my abono was gone. I found the guy and confronted him, but I didn’t feel like getting stabbed or beaten up for 25 euros. Honestly, I was more pissed about the metro pass, since it was past the 15 of the month and I had another 3 weeks before I left the city.

And after that?

After that, my roommate got his wallet stolen a week later around C/Princesa, despite the fact that we’d both been borderline paranoid about our stuff. At one point, I even watched two professionals work a tourist couple from about 20 yards away…one guy chats and slips the wallet out, places it on a garbage bin while his buddy passes by and takes the loot. Boom-boom-boom, and the whole exchange took 5 seconds. I kept mum—not because I didn’t care, but because there wasn’t much I could do.

Paranoia

Now that I’m back, I pat my wallet in my pocket every 2 minutes on the metro, or just keep my hand on it. Call me crazy, I don’t give a damn, but I don’t want my stuff stolen again. A guy I work with got his wallet stolen his first week here—along with all his credit cards, 300 euros, his driver’s license and social security card. He’s a good guy and just had a lapse in judgment. Here’s some tips to not be that guy/girl:

1. Don’t carry tons of cash on you. It sounds simple, but you’ll be a lot less upset if something happens and you’re out 25 euros, as opposed to 250.
2. Keep your wallet up front. Back pockets are bullseyes for thieves on the metro, crowded areas in the center and any tourist location.
3. Don’t put yourself in questionable situations. Look, if you think it’s ok to wander around Retiro when it’s dark, well, you get what’s coming to you. A couple of my friends think it’s not a big deal, but they’re just naïve. I hope nothing ever happens, but I wouldn’t be surprised if anything did.
4. Be skeptical of someone approaching you in a public place and just wanting to chat, especially if they’re with one or two other people. People here are usually pretty friendly, but have you ever met anyone walking down the street who wanted to hang out and get to know you for real? Me neither.
5. Keep your purse/bag clutched. Putting it on the ground in the metro makes it a lot easier to lose track of. If you move around, it may get picked up in the process.
6. Don’t make it obvious you have something valuable. A laptop bag screams “steal me.” Nobody wants that.
7. Leave your passport at home unless absolutely necessary. Sometimes you’ll need it when shopping; bring it for that then leave it at home. Keep a photocopy with you instead. Also, your driver’s license won’t do you much good in Spain. Same goes with your US health insurance, auto insurance, and any other thing you can’t use here.
8. If you have multiple credit cards, take only one with you. If all your cards are cancelled, how do you expect to pay for anything until you get a new card? I think I’m a fairly charming guy, but I can’t compete with the guy dressed up as a robot or a violinist when I’m begging in order to pay my rent next month.

Beating it into your brain

Basically, most of this stuff is common sense. I thought I had it under control, and I still got my wallet ganked. All in all, I’d say I feel safer in Madrid than I did in the city I used to live in, Columbus, Ohio, if only because I’m not afraid of violent crime here. Although given the choice, I’d prefer to never be robbed, but if it has to happen, I’d rather it be done by someone with great manual dexterity than by a dude bashing me over the head with a tire iron. Sure you might wake up with a headache the next day either way, but in the latter case, you wake up in a hospital. Even so, the main point is just be cautious, and extra-cautious in touristy places. Madrid is a beautiful place altogether—I love it and there’s a billion reasons I came back—but everybody’s got skeletons in their closets.

Jin Hen Kim harks back to a bygone age; when Britney was unstoppable and Shakira stuck to singing

Once upon a time, Shakira used to be a singer. The days when she would do with her voice what she does now with her hips are long gone. Now she looks like a product of Molotov’s “El Carnal de las Estrellas” and sounds like a badly-dubbed version of herself.

With a guitar and the voice of a pubescent boy, she captured the Spanish-speaking teenage demographic. They would eventually make money and support her career for the rest of her life. And then she decided to forsake us to become an international erotic dancer. Maybe she’ll become the subject of the next generation’s wet dreams and make money that way.