Movie night!

We went to MBK, Bangkok's super-ultra-megamall. It occupies a full city block stacked seven stories deep, with a mega-plex and vendor population roughly the size of a Midwestern county seat. It's westernized enough to be generally segregated into purchasing categories, i.e. one floor is cosmetic pharmaceuticals, another is cell phones, another is dining and furniture. A truly Thai construct would be a hodgepodge of availability: rather than congregating by product, businesses would be arranged by whoever showed up and staked out territory, where they would return day after day, week after week.

It also happened that I was distracted by a display of DVDs--there were a couple of titles I've had an eye out for since before arrival in-country, and they were in English. Score!

So here's me, picking up DVD cases and handing them to the nice girl, who asks for a ridiculously low price; I don't even haggle.

"Come back in 15 minutes."

As we walk around and see more DVD hawkers, it hits me: they're just copying! One place will have a few hundred titles, each of which is stored on a hard drive and photocopied for display and hawking.

Oh.

So maybe when I thought, "That's not even out yet!" I was not so far off.