The Ethics of Oxygen
Re: Blog Post #1: Thanks to all who weighed in on my incorrect spelling of the country Colombia. Clearly this was not a typo as I misspelled it five times, including in the title of the blog itself. Not sure if I was thinking of the university that I didn’t attend, or the rugged clothing brand I don’t own, or I just simply never read a map closely. Que embarazada! That means “How embarrassing!” in Spanush. (I know it doesn’t, you fools. It means ‘how pregnant,’ which I am certainly not—see blog title: Upper 40.) OK, now that weave cleered that up, on to day two….
Before we left on “our adventure,” which it will be known as until something goes wrong, I hand-picked facts about our destination to share with my son. Will he care that the national bird is the Andean Condor? That Colombia houses the world’s largest protected tropical rainforest and has coastlines on two oceans? That it sits on the Ring of Fire and is prone to volcanoes and earthquakes? Or that Shakira is Colombian? What I deliberately don’t mention is that Manizales sits approximately—OK, exactly—7090 feet above sea level. Younger people experience altitude sickness more frequently than older ones, though in the former, symptoms are generally less severe. If I don’t tell him, maybe he’ll just push through any breathing discomfort during drills and scrimmages. It will be an endurance training opportunity in disguise. Then when he returns to the States he’ll have an advantage over his ten-year old opponents. Sounds like a Win-Win-Winded to me.
Training this morning was at the city’s Estadio Palogrande, the 32,000 seat home stadium of the city’s Once Caldas soccer team who won the Copa Libertadores in 2004. I know this not from wikipedia but because after the practice we saw the trophy up close. On the exquisitely pressed grass field, teams were assigned, mixing up kids from New York and Manizales and matching them in orange jerseys. They don’t yet know each others’ names, but instead of “Pass!” they yelled “Aqui!” “Soccer Truly Has No Borders” is the motto of South Fork United, the organization sponsoring this trip. I find the “truly” superfluous but the spirit of the message proves true.
Late afternoon we boarded the Chiva Party bus, and contrary to my usual distaste for loud music, I loved the blaring Spanish soundtrack. Seating was in the round and there were no seatbelts, which was tough for me (see blog post #1). But as the bus climbed the steep hills of Manizales and the kids hung out the windows and swung from the poles with lollipops in their mouths, I loosened up. As a Midwestern girl from the plains, this vertical city is my idea of heaven. And I think we actually got pretty close to heaven at the wistapoint (that’s how I said vista point as a kid) that we visited at sunset. There were paragliders swooshing above and goats grazing below and in the middle, happy people drinking salty mango lemonades and eating papas fritas. I have been guzzling the limonada here. It’s so tart I let my son have seconds.