day four: breakfast shirt, baseball

This morning a shirt vendor crashed breakfast and began selling us shirts with the tradtional flower embroidery around the neckline. He randomly picked me, of all people, and recommended a shirt - a black one! It was really pretty, and even Christiane was very encouraging, so I bought it. The price was half what we tend to pay in the markets, so I feel pretty good about it. Also, I found a coconut stuffed phyllo pastry in Christiane´s morning pastry collection - a good morning.
In school we covered the basics of the ancient culture history of the Yucatan - time periods, social structure, subsistence, etcetera - and some basics of the Maya calendar system, which is complex and involves a few different calendars. In Spanish, Ricardo covered greetings and how to say the date. I´m keeping up pretty well; a lot of it is similar to Latin.
After school, Isley, the Spanish teacher´s assistant, promised to take us to a very authentic Yucatecan restaurant; after waiting for people who decided to randomly go to the bank for half an hour, we followed her, only to find ourselves at the same place with the amazing lime soup from the day before. It was a lot different dining in a large group; like restaurants everywhere, they seem to have problems handling large orders. I ordered panuches, which are a local variety of taco, and they arrived quickly, but the lime soup I ordered with them never arrived. Anne´s guacamole also never arrived. Luckily, a few random orders of fajitas arrived, so we ate them instead, and they were amazing.
After food, I had to go back to the Flamingo to sleep; I can´t sleep past 7:30 here with the noise from the street, so a siesta is necessary to get through the evening.
The evening was taken up wit a Mexican baseball game that Carlos took us to. It was my first baseball game ever, so I learned a lot - mainly that the ball game is the least interesting thing there.
The Yucatec Leones were playing the Mimatitlan Oilers, who were unknown to Carlos, probably because they aren´t very good. While the game went on, there were all sorts of distractions. There was a crazy lion mascot, who stood around on the field dancing and clowning around. He jumped the wall and came up to get his picture taken with the gringas, which was pretty entertaining.

There were also a few varieties of scantily clad women: cheerleaders, a ball girl in Corona green and yellow, and random sponsor girls who threw free samples of the sponsor´s products, like pens, water bottles, and shakers of salt. Apparently one of the major sponsors is a salt manufacturer.

(the ball girl, in lime green and neon yellow)

And the food! Peanuts, popcorn, ice cream, cotton candy, but also random things like salbutes (like panuches without beans), nachos, pizza, donuts, kibi, and sliced mango with ketchup and chili powder (very strange, but good mango).


In the end, the Leones won by a mile - they got five runs in one inning! - and everyone left happy. We went to Carlos´apartment for a bit, and then cabbed back to the Flamingo to get some rest.