DVDs

I was lucky enough to get to go back home to California for two weeks during the winter holidays.


Christmas à la plage.
I made sure to only put really light weight objects on my x-mas wish list and asked my parents to not gift me anything too heavy, as I was hoping to use the return flight as an opportunity to bring more of my belongings to France.

As luck would have it, the gifts that I brought to CA with me far outweighed the gifts I received (why are wine bottles so freaking heavy?), and left me with some space to bring back beloved objects that up till now were residing in my parents’ garage.

I brought back some old journals, some clothes, my Ewok stuffed animal, and a ridiculous amount of DVDs.

Since the first time I moved to France, I’ve been treating my parents’ house like a Blockbuster. I have a CD case holder that I fill up with DVDs that I then I change out every time I go home.


My Ewok, books, and movie rental hardware.
This year, however, I got some DVDs for Christmas that I didn’t necessarily want to take up space in my special DVD trading case; I decided to take my French film DVDs back to France to share them with the French boyfriend; and I also wanted to borrow my Dad’s DVDs of the original Star Wars films as it’d been too long since I’d seen them and scandalously, the French boyfriend hasn’t seem them since he was a child.

All in all, I brought back a lot of DVDs and left some other treasured objects behind.

Now it’s important to note that Europe and North America are in different zones for DVDs. This means that a DVD made for viewing in America is considered a “zone 1” DVD, and can only be played by North American “zone 1” DVD players*. France, along with the rest of Europe, is in “zone 2.”

This has never been a problem as my computer is from America, and therefore plays zone 1 DVDs. For French DVDs, we use French boyfriend's French computer. Everything works out dandily.

Except that as soon as I got back to France, my laptop’s DVD drive stopped working.

So much for that.

*Apparently DVD players exist now-a-days that can play both zones, but unemployed me is a little too tight on money to purchase one. Also, I’m not sure I believe them.