Theatre, cinema and TV in my life

Intro: Culture is a very important part of our life. In a way, the ability of being cultural is what makes the difference between animals and us. There are many types of entertainment. We can go to the cinema, to the theatre, at a concert or disco, to the museum. Culture consists not only of art, literature and music, but it consist also of styles of dress, language, rules of behaviour, religion, technology and political system.
Cinema: The cinemas are very popular among adults and teenagers. They offer great atmosphere for watching films – darkness, a big projecting screen, popcorn, cola … Cinema tickets usually cost about 100 crowns here in Poděbrady and 150 to 300 in big cinemas in Prague. I don’t go to cinema very often. I prefer watching films and serials at home in DVD player or my laptop. I don’t like high prices and masses of people. I like fantasy films (The Lord of the Rings), sci-fi (Star Trek), crime comedies (The Pink Panther) and films from Marvel Cinematic Universe (Avengers).
TV: I don’t watch TV any more. There is more gap in a broadcast full of commercials than the broadcast. I like only AZ quiz, so when I want to watch it, I watch it on the internet.
Theatre: In a theatre, there is spacious stage with various lighting effects. Behind the stage there is the backstage area. At the beginning and end of each performance a curtain rises and falls. In the course of performance actors appear in different costumes and masks. Tickets to the theatre may cost much more then to the cinema. Our best known theatre is the National Theatre in Prague. Tickets are expensive there and must be bought well in advance. In Prague, there are also many other theatres. In Poděbrady, there are both – the cinema and the theatre. I don’t like going to theatres, it’s boring and expensive. I used to go there only with school.
Galleries and museums: Many people enjoy visiting museums and galleries. A visit to a museum contributes to our education and enriches our mind. There are many kinds of museums. There can be museums of history, agriculture, industry… the biggest and also most important Czech museum is in Prague, the National Museum. I like museums. I visited at least once museums in Poděbrady, Nymburk, Kolín, Kutná Hora, Lysá nad Labem, Čelákovice … Sometime after my final exam I’m going to visit an exhibition Gateway to Space in Prague.
Literature: Reading is another source of knowledge and culture. There have been many famous Czech writers in our history. Well-knows Czech writers of the 20th century include Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Čapek, Jaroslav Škvorecký, Milan Kundera or our ex-president Václav Havel. Jaroslav Seifert is our only one poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1984. The second of two Czech Nobel Prize winner was professor Jaroslav Heyrovský – he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1959 for the invention and development of the polarographic method, a new branch of electrochemistry. I love especially fantasy stories, so it’s not surprising that my favourite authors writes in this genre. I like mainly John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which is enacted on the Earth in alternative timeline of the Napoleonic wars fought with dragons, Christopher Paolini and his Inheritance Cycle, Richard A. Knaak with DragonRealm series or trilogy His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman.
Music: I listen to quite unusual kinds of music. Firstly, I grew up on Era – it is a New Age music project by French composer Eric Lévi. Era mixes Gregorian chants and occasionally world music with contemporary electronic arrangements. They use lyrics which although similar to Greek or Latin are in fact deliberately devoid of any exact meaning. Recently, I started listen to epic trailer music and symphony metal or symphony power metal. The best-known groups composed epic music are Two Steps from Hell and X-Ray Dog. From symphony metal groups I love Epica, Nightwish, Amaranthe and Rhapsody of Fire. Nightwish is a band from Kitee, Finland. It formed in 1996 by lead songwriter and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen, guitarist Emppu Vuorinen, and lead singer Tarja Turunen. Rhapsody of Fire is quite strange, because all of their albums can be considered to be a series of fantasy stories.