Play Ball

We headed south to watch baseball. To commune with fifteen thousand sports fans, enjoying the warm climate and cold beers. To cheer for the hometown team, and root for quality play. To sit outside in the sun and watch a bunch of men hit a ball with a stick. To squirm and continuously reposition our collective buttocks on immeasurably hard plastic and aluminum seats.

That last one wasn’t really our intention, just an unintended consequence of the field conditions. Towards the end of the day, I’d be getting up every half inning to recirculate, and then sit down with another dollar beer. That’s right. Ball park beers – for a dollar. Five Bolivars, actually, but close enough to a buck, especially considering the eight to ten dollar beers at any professional stadium here. They weren’t huge, though – probably ten ounces – but that made for most all of them being served well cold and fully carbonated.


Plus, you could get them past the seventh inning. In fact, one evening, the game required a tenth, and you could still get beers. Or, if you didn’t feel like another beer, you could get a bottle of whiskey delivered to your seat, which sure beats trying to sneak it in past the AK-47 wielding, riot helmet wearing, carbon fiber cup snuggling (I made that one up (I hope)) national guardsmen at the gate.

True that. They sold a number of whiskeys, some recognizable, some not so much, like the very popular “Something Special” which, surprisingly, is a Seagram product. Anyway, for about 200 Bolivars, staff would transfer the contents into a fresh 750 milliliter plastic bottle, fill the decorative box with ice, and deliver both, along with a few plastic ice-filled cups, to your seat. From that point, the neat-rocks-mixed choice was yours, as was the choice to get stupid drunk a la American Sports Fans, which no one did.

Sadly, not every spectator could get booze delivered, only those in the upper deck and VIP seating (generally between the bases). They also got better concessions, but only if you believe “better” means tasty chicken breast sandwich vice tasty steaming pile of grilled tripe.

Mmmm,… organs.

The baseball wasn’t bad, either. Essentially, the Caribbean Series pits the champion teams from each of the national leagues of Venezuela, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico (actually, a territorial league) in a double round robin tournament. Each ticket bought you use of one seat for both afternoon and evening games, after which you had seen all four teams play. As expected, the Dominican Republic crushed, Venezuela was embarrassed, Puerto Rico was poorly supported, and the Mexicans got quite loud (one of their fans brought his sousaphone).

Overall, it felt like Double A ball. But there’s something to be said for Double A ball played out of doors, in 85 degree weather, with dollar beers, in February.

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PTO

There’s only so much snow I can handle, and that amount diminishes with each passing year. Snow used to be fun, with the sledding and snowballs and snow this and snow that. I suppose it was around when I bought my first driveway that the pleasure began to wane. For a number of years, I even entertained the thought that just an inch, every few days, would be fine throughout the winter – just enough to whitewash the winter grime.

Now, with increasingly thin blood and the steepest driveway ever, I’ll do what it takes to minimize my exposure, including a few years in the Tropics, my winter excursion to war torn Iraq and last week’s trip to Caribbean Venezuela, where the weather back home was, quite seriously, the very least of my concerns.


Not that I had that many concerns. I had some, but not many. Cash was one, as local ATM’s were occasionally available, but not accommodating. However, I could make a wire transfer to our hotelier, who would swap my Federal Reserve Notes for black market rate Bolivars. On occasion, the Visa would work, but costs really weren’t so bad that I needed to carry huge sums of cash to get us through a day on the beach, or an evening at the ball park.

Security is always an issue. There’re places in my own metropolitan area that I won’t go into unprepared, so why would I travel to Hugo Chaves-land and not maintain a high degree of situational awareness? Venezuela is known for her high crime rate and the kidnap and murder rates there are definitely worthy of some concern. However, if you behave like a soft target, you will get targeted, so we didn’t do that. We kept to main roads, minimized our public drunkenness, took care in selected our taxis, and tried to return to the compound at a reasonable hour. Ultimately, besides a couple of unsuccessful pickpocketing attempts by others, we survived unscathed.

Language was a problem. However, when the various skills and vocabularies of four gringos were combined, we could usually order a meal (“pollo empanadas, por favor”), secure a couple of beers (“dos cervesa Solara por el camino”), hail a cab (“taxi!”), or shun some beachside higglers (“no gracias, no gracias, no gracias, no gracias, no gracias, no gracias,…”). In general, there were fewer English speakers than any of the other places I’ve traveled, which makes me again regret taking Russian in High School. At the time, no one knew who was going to win the Cold War, so I thought it prudent if I could speak the language of our potential new overlords. In retrospect, Spanish is the Lingua Franca of most of the Americas, and much handier. Next time – really – I’ll try to get some more formalized training.

But snow? Not a concern. Too much sun was the real problem – if you could call 85 degree, partly cloudy days on the beach a problem – which I most emphatically do not. Again (to get the point across), it was 85 degrees and partly cloudy,… every,… single,… day. In the translated and summarized words of our Venezuelan hosts, “you need another beer with that?”
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