I have lived almost eight years in this country, and I had never been to a baseball game. Yes, I lived in Chicago for almost five years, and never went to Wrigley Field, and I have been in Boston for almost three years, and I had never been to Fenway Park. I must say that I wasn’t even following baseball, until a couple of years ago. That’s actually the main reason why I never even tried to go to a ball game.

But a couple of weeks ago I finally went to Fenway. It was almost a home opener, the second game of the season, the Red Sox taking on the Rays. Olesya is not a baseball fan, and she’s definitely not a fan of cold weather (it’s April in Boston, you know?), so she didn’t come. But Che-Lin was visiting, so that was a good reason to get tickets.

We had a good time. It was fun to experience all these goofy rituals, like the songs they sing in the late innings, or all this yelling at the guy who caught the ball in the first home-run by Tampa: “Throw it back! Throw it back!” On the food side, I made the mistake of eating something at home before the game. So, once in the park, I was still kind of full, and I only ate a hot dog (Che-Lin did go for seconds after the game). They sell of course a lot of stuff in the park, like pizza, pretzels, ice cream, cotton candy… It all looks tempting. I don’t drink, so, no beer for me. I bought a nice base ball for Jerónimo, my nephew, with Wally (the Red Sox mascot) on it.

With regards to the game, it was a fairly decent one. Unfortunately, we lost. (Yeah, Ira will be disappointed to hear me saying that “we” lost… Sorry, man, nothing personal, but when in Rome…) Incidentally, I missed most of Tampa’s runs; they decided to score every time I went downstairs to stay warm or go to the bathroom, but not when I was in my seat. I should have stayed put, I guess, and maybe we would’ve won. But it was fun to go anyway.

I will just wait until the weather gets warmer, and hopefully Olesya will be willing to come along, if nothing else, at least to get a hot dog, a beer, maybe some cotton candy, listen to the whole stadium singing “So good! So good!”, and hopefully catch the ball when Youkilis sends it over the green monster —now, that’d be really cool!