Yesterday we found a movie rental place called Video World near Kottbusser Tor. They have 3 floors of exciting foreign & German cinema, including everything you would find at your local Blockbuster plus some of the odder titles you might only find on Netflix or Greencine (the independent film alternative to Netflix that Carlos and I used to use back in San Francisco). Movies are arranged thematically, and subcategorized by common actor / director. For example in the “Stoner Movie” section you will find Harold & Kumar, Cheech & Chong, Half-Baked, and what’s this? Lord of the Rings?
They also have a small café/lounge which is probably open at all the times we wouldn’t be there, and a scary bottom floor for films of a mature nature. Now the weird stuff: to open an account they absolutely require your passport. Identification of other sorts won’t fly. Don’t ask me why, this is just how things are done. You also have to put down a deposit of 3 euros on a membership card. Apparently they even reuse membership cards in this country. Lastly, and perhaps most oddly, you pay per day, not just per movie. For example, the movies we rented on Friday at midnight (they’re open until 1) were due back on Saturday at 1:00. We mistakenly thought that the cashier had said we had one day, and so bringing them back before 1 AM would be fine. Unfortunately, as we brought them back at 5 PM the next day this counted as a whole other day of rental for each video, and so we ended up spending 3 euro or so for a day of video watching we didn’t need. Crazy. When I mentioned to the cashier that we have 5 days to return films in the states he looked at me flatly and said “Oh, that’s good.” I would like to say we will not be back, but as long as our computers continue to play region-encoded DVDs we probably will (Carlos’s Macbook & my Sony Vaio both say we have 4 region encode changes left. Whoopie.)
