Last week we made our first visit to the new Kino cinema in Rye – Battleaxe promised to visit this in a recent post about the Kino in Hawkhurst.
Well, the Rye Kino is excellent. The conversion of the old building is attractive and sympathetic and set well back from Lion Street. You would scarcely know it was there, and even the most anxious Rye resident must feel reassured.
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Kino in Rye – outside |
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Cafe Bar |
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Cafe bar – much better photo from the architects |
Inside, there is a good size cafe bar with a mezzanine seating floor, and two screens, Red and Blue. The loos are sumptuous.
We had planned to eat our supper in the cafe bar, but they’d sold out of the hot dish on the menu, so we opted to try elsewhere.
Oh my goodness, has anyone tried wandering round Rye on a cold February evening looking for something to eat? That place is so quiet it’s like some creepy gothic movie. We went into the George at the bottom of Lion Street, and they had stopped serving bar meals at 5.30pm. We were offered restaurant menus but we didn’t want to settle down to a vast gourmet meal – no time, and too expensive. There was nothing else open on the High Street at all except for the chippie – no pubs, nothing, and not a soul to be seen. It was totally silent. The Headless Horseman could have ridden past and nobody would have noticed.
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Rye at night (Geograph) |
We walked down to the bottom of the town and found Simply Italian. We’ve been many times to the Hastings branch and sat outside for a salad lunch, and done the same once in Rye, but never eaten hot food in the evening. The restaurant was nearly empty, but the food was good, and quick, comfort eating, which is just what we needed by then. I had lasagne – a real traditional plateful. The freezing walk back up to the Kino did not seem so bad with a boiling Vesuvius of pasta inside.
We had a coffee in the cafe bar and surveyed our fellow cinema-goers. We were there to see the live screening of the Royal Opera House production of Der Fliegende Hollander, so maybe the audience were not typical, but as so often for these events, they were predominantly elderly, white and thoroughly middle-class veering towards the posh. I overheard a good snippet of conversation when Philosopher was at the Bar:
‘There are no virgins left in Havana, one understands.’
Did this refer to (mythical) cigar rolling on the thighs of dusky maidens? For our next poetry exercise for the Stanza group, the theme is Conversation. Potential there, methinks.
Anyway, Wagner is not Battleaxe’s thing, but Philosopher assured me that as this was one of his earliest works, I would enjoy it, and indeed I did. Bryn Terfel as the Dutchman did an excellent job as the Pale Stranger (not the Headless Horseman) and the setting was very dark and mysterious – shadowy ghost ships, spectral crew appearing from the floor. However, we both felt the sound balance of the broadcast was not quite right – too much orchestra drowning some of the voices. The production was 2.5 hours with no interval, so I did worry about the bladder continence of the audience, but they all held on.
On that theme, while the seats were comfortable and spacious, one quibble I have about the design of the screen we were in (Red) is that there is an aisle only down one side, so long rows of seats can only be accessed from one end. Not good at all if people in seats down the far end arrive late or want to get out in the middle of a performance.
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Comfy seating…. |
That’s it for a bit from Battleaxe. Next week we are off to the Arctic, hunting the Northern Lights. I gather the internet on our Hurtigruten boat is a bit intermittent, so will write about it when I get back.
March 1 today – Spring is in the air. Here are some miniature irises in our garden.
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Miniature irises in Battleaxe’s garden |
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