Mind games

Bogotá appears determined to rob me of my former conceits and replace them with new ones. In just another one of its mind games, I am now the largest woman in the country…well, except for that German giant, and we all know Germans don’t count (she’s actually very nice – an anomaly!) But the image I’ve been carting around since a few minor victories in high school of myself as an athlete? Time to reevaluate.

This all started a few weeks ago at the Parque Simon Bolivar (one of the most beautiful parks I’ve ever seen) when I noticed one of the Fulbrighters from last year was in incredible shape. I asked what she did for exercise, and it turns out she’s on the national women’s rugby team. The National Team! Now, I didn’t go out and try to play with the big girls right off, but Friday night I attended (took part in? screwed up at?) the Los Andes girls’ rugby team’s first practice of the season. Two days later, I’m still regretting it.

I walk like an old lady when I walk at all, and last night I actually had to get help going down a particularly long set of stairs so as not to cry in public. Aside from that time my basketball archrival (yeah, you know who you are) dropped a barbell with 90 pounds of weights on my nose, this is the worst pain I can recall. That hurt for an hour or two, but this just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. Ah well, at least I have an honorable complaint. Sometimes that’s what life is all about, the complaint worth telling.

So naturally yesterday my roommate and I went and bought me some cleats, and I’m lacing up for another go at it. I may be the biggest girl on the team, but fortunately for my ego, I am not the absolute worst. Oh no, there’s one whole girl who’s worse than I am. This is so much like junior high I almost can’t laugh about it.

Almost, except that we have two coaches who are buddies (sound familiar, anyone?), one of who is the boyfriend of the team’s best player (also sounding familiar, but less creepy since they are nearly the same age and he is a volunteer, not an adult in a position of trust), and everyone calls the other coach…are you ready for this? Virus. Yes, Virus. And it suits him. I fully expect him to start throwing chalk any day now (visions of junior year high school ball when our coach was named Chitwood and fully lived up to all the nicknames we made up for him).

But instead of being intimidated by all the yelling, it strikes me as pretty darn funny. We’re probably the same age, and here is a grown man yelling at me to do 30 more sit-ups. Actually, that part kind of reminds me of home (we all know I’m talking about you, José). The amazing part to me is that I am willing to do it. I just can’t let all these 90-pound slips of girls be better at rugby than I am. Soccer, maybe. But rugby, no way!

They practice twice a week, but one of the nights I have class until 7 and the field is an hour and a half away, so I’ll have to skip that one. But Friday nights, from 6 pm until they get sick of us and it’s too dark to retie our shoelaces (this first one went until 8:45!) I’ll be out there, sloshing around, making a fool of myself, but hopefully getting into better shape in this thin mountain air, and maybe even someday advancing the ball a few yards. Now that will be a day to reevaluate.

But until then, there’s always dancing! My roommate’s new Colombian flame asked me to teach the two of them how to salsa last night. This is not exactly the Colombian dance scene I was expecting, where few people even know how to dance and an out of practice gringa can be considered a good dancer…but I was flattered, and now I’m a salsa teacher. Well, kind of. It may have been the lack of good lighting in the club we went to that made him think I was in any way the slightest bit qualified or able to teach them how to dance, but I’ll take it. Now that I’m no longer an athlete, maybe I can pass for a dancer. At least until the lights go on.

Recent Books

I started reading a book I tried to read a while back in Spanish yesterday (I ran out of English reading material…): Mi País Inventada by Isabel Allende. I love it. She writes of her nostalgia for her native Chile, which she had to leave after democratically elected president Salvador Allende was toppled by a CIA-backed plot to install the infamous General Pinochet in his place. She has lived in San Francisco for decades now, and knows what it is like to miss home. I can finally understand most of it in Spanish, which feels like a milestone to me, since it was a dense maze of words chosen solely to confuse me a few months ago.

I just finished another wonderful book, also a memoir of time in Latin America, a few days ago: Dancing with Cuba by Alma Guillermoprieto. (Bonus points to anyone who can pronounce her name.) Guillermoprieto has been a journalist also for decades, and has written several wonderful books about current events and history of Latin America that I highly recommend for anyone looking for good starter books on the region (Looking for History and The Heart that Bleeds). As a reporter, she has proven herself brave and intrepid, interviewing terrorists, military men, country folks, and world leaders with grace and aplomb. But as it turns out, before she became an internationally known journalist, she was a dancer. As a young woman, realizing she would never be the next Martha Graham, she was offered and accepted a position teaching modern dance in Havana, Cuba. She arrived in full swing of the Ten Million Ton Harvest to teach in a mirrorless studio (to avoid fueling the artist’s conceits). You can see the early seeds of the writer she would become in the concerns and obsessions of the young dancer she was.