IAS 2009 Live

IAS 2009 Live

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night. I was glad that I could still see it the day it came out, despite not seeing it at midnight! I went in my 'muggle' t-shirt I got from the HP exhibit in Chicago :-) It turns out that people in Lima were excited to see it too, because the 8:10 and 9:30 subtitled AND dubbed shows were sold out! I ended up seeing the 11:00 pm show... which means that I got to wait around a lot. Interesting fact: the translation of the title in the the Spanish version is variously written as both Harry Potter y el Misterio del Principe and Harry Potter y el Misterio del Principe Mestizo. This is interesting to me because the first just says '...and the mystery of the prince' and the second says '...the mixed prince'. 'Mestizo' can mean 1/2 Spanish and 1/2 indigenous, or just mixed in general in Latin America. In the English version, the 'half-blood prince' is actually a play on words that doesn't translate. Too bad, but I think a good try for cultural adaption.

I ended up going to the bookstore that was in the movie theater complex and getting a great Lima map (it shows the block number so I can find practically anything!) and a book of Peruvian myths and legends in Spanish. I still had a ton of time so I got some helado de lucuma, or lucuma ice cream, which I have never found outside Peru. It's got a unique flavor that I like!

The movie was of course great. I hadn't re-read the sixth book before seeing it, so I couldn't pick up right away what things were missing, aside from a couple memories of Tom Riddle, some quidditch, and a major fight scene in the end in which a character gets hurt and it plays a role in the seventh book. It demonstrates how the Weasly family has sacrificed for the overall story, but they also added a scene that showed the Weasly house burning down, which had the same effect. The scene in which everyone raised their lit wand near the end was also different than the book, and I thought better. They also had an annoyingly high number of scenes that demonstrated teen angsty love. I didn't remember it being so annoying in the book... Overall, it was a good night and I had fun, even though I was by myself :-)

Map of Lima Locations

View Lima Locations in a larger map

I'll update this as I visit new locations!
Here's a link: http://bit.ly/LimaMap