In "Berlin Ragbag," a couple posts ago, I mentioned how very long I'd spent puzzling over why video rental stores here always also sell ice cream – until the thought finally emerged from deep within my German memory (the part of my brain that partly draws on my own experience, but partly on what I've absorbed from German friends about their childhoods, since I myself didn't have a German childhood) that I was almost certain there's a long tradition of ice cream being a main snack sold in German movie theaters – and that people maybe even used to come around and sell it right inside the theater – and that that's where this deep-seated "movie + ice cream" association stems from.
Well, I'm proud to report that last weekend I did the whole seeing-a-movie-at-a-massive-megaplex thing for the first time in a long time, and someone actually came in selling ice cream! My German memory vindicated.
Also, can I just say that the number of ads shown in German cinemas is just unreal? I wish I'd thought to check my watch and time the it, because it was beyond absurd: They showed a very, very long string of ads (not just movie trailers, also just general advertisements, high-quality, TV-type ones), then the curtain closed in front of the screen (another typical German thing, a short official break after the ads and before the feature starts), but then after the curtain reopened, there were more ads, before the movie actually started.
This was a long movie to begin with (for which, in Germany, they cheekily add a long-movie surcharge! movie theaters in the US don't do this, do they?) so I think all told we spent about three hours there.
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Also, in an exciting linguistic side note:
I once wrote about a German woman telling me how mortified she'd been when she made the mistake, in an English-speaking country, of asking someone if they were standing "on the snake" instead of "on line" (that's "queue" to the Brits) – because in German the word for snake, "Schlange," is also used for a line/queue.
Well, I've happily discovered that she wasn't actually that far off-base: I just learned that the British word "queue" comes from a Latin root that means "tail." So, while it's not "snake," exactly, it's a very similar idea. (That a line of people waiting for something looks a bit like an animal's tail.)
I love when word meanings converge!
In the UK they serve little single-serving pots of ice cream at intermission of plays. The theatre workers set up little stands half-way down all the aisles so you don't have to wait in a long queue at the concession counter. I wonder if they do this in other places too.
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