Melissa and Rob: Day of Fun

First of all, thanks everybody for your encouraging emails and comments on the blog; that has really helped me a lot. I will get back to replying to you all but it may take me a while!

Anyway, Rodolfo was here the other night and told us that there was an all-stars baseball game in San Ramon this weekend (baseball is big here, ever since some branch of the US armed forces introduced the game at some point when they were either trying to destroy or help this country, I can’t remember which). Rob and I rode over there to see the game today, but we got there before it started, so I suggested we ride on to Tichana, the next town over. I’d never been that far and considering how scared I am of riding on these roads (more on that later), I figured I might never be up for doing this again. So we kept going on some gi-normous hills—I walked the bike on most of these. We saw the property that our friends Doug-las and Tax’a bought over there, and I was content to turn around, but Rob said there was a really pretty viewpoint just another kilometer ahead. So we went; it was pretty nice. Here are a few photos:


And then on the way back, Rob snapped a picture of the road. This is why I am terrified of riding a bike here:


As we cruised back in to San Ramon, the baseball game was in full swing and also, Rob got a flat tire on his bike. Luckily there is a “bike shop” in town. Its really just somebody’s house. We pulled in and 4 small boys set to work on the tire (there were no adults around). We asked what the charge was and they said 6 cordobas—that is something like 30 cents. We gave them 10 and told them to keep the change; they seemed pretty happy.

We hadn’t brought enough water with us, since we’d only planned on going to San Ramon and back, so then we stopped at Chico’s pulperia for some juice. Chico’s is the place where I used to hang out when I was here alone for my pilot study, and Chico himself is a good friend of my quasi-dissertation advisor, Pablo.

After refreshing with some juice, we watched the baseball game for a while. It sort of reminded me of the rodeo I saw in October; that is, it seemed deeply confusing and disorganized. The players were all wearing uniforms, but none of the uniforms were the same so I didn’t know who was on what team (I guess perhaps this is because it was an “all stars” game). And every once and a while, some of the spectators would just ride their bikes through the field, not during a time out (do they even have time outs in baseball?) or anything. But Rob seemed to be making sense of it. He would say things like, “Hey, that guy just made a double play” or “He just hit a pop-fly.” I was surprised that Rob knew so much about baseball; he must have been paying attention all those years at his brother’s games. Rob also revealed to me that from the ages of 10-14 he was the “official scorekeeper” for the little league. So I guess he knows a whole lot about baseball.



At any rate, I’ve got to go wash some clothes (see post below for how this is done); thanks for reading.