At the end of the day Esme and I went to Plaza las Americas, a new shopping center in Xalapa. The shopping center has a movies theatre, and we both wanted to see a movie. So when we arrived we first bought our tickets for "Memoirs of a Geisha" since we both wanted to see that movie.
Since we had about one hour before the movie was going to start, we visited some shops. First we went to a shop that, so we discovered last time, a small selection of English books. Esme thought I wanted to buy "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" of the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. But I was not sure. Esme said she wanted to buy "Memoirs of a Geisha", and since I wanted to read it as well, I convinced her to buy it, even though we were going to see the movie in less then an hour.
Next we looked around in "Liverpool", a big shop, and extremely overpriced, like many other shops in Plaza las Americas. For example: Duracell AA batteries cost over 70 pesos. Most shops in the center of Xalapa sell the same type of Duracell batteries for just above 40 pesos. And digital cameras? Most shops in Xalapa sell those at about twice the price most shops in the USA sell them, and Liverpool just adds a bit to that.
Anyway, we walked a bit inside the big shop and suddenly I discovered a pet section. They had a tarantula (without any hiding place, poor animal), a python, a few leopard geckos, and a Pandinus imperator (Emperor scorpion). The latter was hidden from view, or maybe already sold. I saw that they fed the animals crickets so asked Esme if she could ask the price. She told me that they sell 12 crickets for 15 pesos. Since we normally pay 1.50 for a single cricket, this was quite a good price.
Esme her phone beeped and hence we had to go to see the movie.
The movie started quite sad, and I was afraid that it would be a sad, sad movie. I still have a difficult time handling such movies, but lucky the movie slowly got better. The movie is very beautifully made, many very nice scenes, and the dancing scene somewhere in the middle is like magic, very impressive. However, I considered the story overall too slow, almost boring, especially in the end. However, the latter might have been caused by the magic that's gone due to the war. All in all a 7 out of 10.