Dannevirke

It's about a year since our last visit to fantasy cave at Dannevirke which means I must have been blogging for a year now!
Noah chose that we would go again these holidays on one of the days Paul had taken off. It is a quintessential NZ experience I feel and I plan to take my brother and his family on their first visit to NZ this December. It's like a big Christmas grotto, a bit faded in adults eyes but magical for children, run by volunteers who call themselves cave dwellers who charge only $1 per child for admittance.
Noah is especially fond/frightened of the mechanical giant's moving boots at the top of a beanstalk.

Afterwards we noticed a local cinema, which was actually mostly a cafe which maybe should have forewarned us. Still it said it was showing Monsters vs Aliens at 1.30. Noah loves this and it's stopped showing at the main cinemas and Paul had never seen it so didn't know about the giant monster that Noah has nominated as his character. So we raced through lunch and arrived at the cinema a bit late expecting to miss adverts. Anyway we got there and two teenage girls were about to shut the cinema but when we arrived they opened it just for us. We couldn't pay for tickets on eftpos, they only take cash. We had to wait outside the cinema until the lights went on, we tried before this and it was pitch black and felt refrigerated

It had obviously once been a lovely cinema but now is a bit outdated - presumably the residents of Dannevirke know this and also that it's very very cold (one heater for whole place - I wore my scarf around my ears and mouth in the end) and also that the film doesn't fit the screen or play at the right speed!
The film was meant for wide screen but they squashed it, when there was a shot of the earth it was rugby ball shaped and the women were very very thin!
Also the whole picture did not fit on screen, this didn't matter too much most of the time but the titles read only "monsters vs"
The film played very very slowly, I thought the funny music at the start was a kind of spoof on the dreamworld titles at first but when the female characters sounded like men in drag, and the picture flickered as we got to see each individual frame we realised it was just too slow!
The good thing was being in the cinema alone (the only other child there left about half way through presumably because of the cold!) which meant Noah could explain to everyone which character they were and this didn't deviate at all from his earlier decision (I don't know how to post a link to a previous post May 18th or I would).
I truly think Noah didn't even notice the cold but Paul, Hannah and I certainly did and were so grateful to be warmed up back in the car. We had joked to Hannah that old cinemas used to be called flea pits and she claimed she was itching all the way home!!