Bangkok Day 9: Planetarium

Imagine you're in a foreign country and you're trying to do things off the beaten path. Imagine you hear of something as awesome as a planetarium, a movie about space in an air-conditioned theater not too far from where you're staying. You do your homework and find out there's a 10AM show in english. Admission is only $1- you're thinking what a steal.

Flash forward to the admission counter. The lady smiles real big and says "There is no English show! Thai show start at 11!" Big grin. We buy our tickets anyway.

We kill a little time and psych ourselves up for the show. How bad could it be? The planetarium at the Natural History Museum in New York is one of the coolest shows ever, and I truly believe I would still say that if I couldn't hear Whoopie Goldberg's sweet, buttery voice narrating.

It's 11 o'clock and we're ushered into the dome with about 200 seventh graders- not a great start. We are the only white people there. We brace ourselves when we see the outdated projector. I silently remind myself to be optimistic.

The show is an hour long. The first half hour is one picture of the stars on the dome. The most drab presenter ever (think Charlie Brown's teacher but with more coughing) points out constellations with a green arrow. Nothing moved, there was no music. A few pre-teens took pictures of the screen like idiots. The kids talked over the presenter the whole time. It was rough.

Ok showtime! The presenter flips on the video entitled "Back to the Moon for Good", voiced by Tim Allen! I love Tim Allen! He's my favorite cocaine-smuggling success story! Before we could ponder how Tim Allen had learned Thai, we realized he hadn't. The dubbing was subpar. My takeaway was... America won again?

We bolted out of the theater and tried to find a redeeming quality of the science center. Everything was either broken or extremely outdated. The plaques were in bad English. The aquarium had only goldfish and catfish. I stood on a scale to see what I would weigh on every planet, and my first try yielded the Earth weight of 67.31 Kg. That couldn't be right. The second time said 54.52 Kg. I wish! So now I know I weight somewhere between 120 and 150.

 Broken or New?

This is my first big SKIP. I'm quite sure I'd prefer to have my dollar rather than that experience. If only Whoopie had been there to translate...