On Sunday up in Wismar I helped James and his two visitors from Seattle, Dave and MC, teach a whole bunch of Germans to play baseball. We had beautiful spring weather for our game in a park that was an army base in the DDR (East Germany), and we ended up playing something like twelve innings. Yesterday I had some serious
muscle cats, and ballet today was still pretty rough.
In my case, the "teaching" was very much along the lines of "Do what I say, not what I do." I can explain the rules, more or less, but by our second game most of the Germans had started to get the hang of it and were putting me to shame. (In most of the pictures of me batting, I'm missing the ball.) Ah, well. More importantly, I think I managed to convey some of the finer points of the game, like when I showed Robert, James' roommate, how to knock the dirt out of his cleats with the bat. Even though he wasn't wearing cleats.
There was one incident in which two runners on first base at the same time turned into, after a succession of egregious fielding errors, a run scored. And something we've dubbed The German Rule developed, in which they interpreted it literally when we said, "If you can get the ball to the base before the runner gets there, he's out," and took to plunking the ball down on the actual base and walking away (regardless of whether there was still a play going on). And then there was the tackling, all on the part of Andy, the only Brit playing.
At one point, some spectators showed up with desserts. Robert's turn to bat came as he was mid-bite, and I was playing catcher. He handed me his brownie to hold, hit the ball, snatched the brownie out of my hand, and made it to first.
My team lost the first game, but we won the second largely thanks to Caroline, Robert's girlfriend, who was last up in our final at-bat. James told her to just run no matter what, which someone else interpreted, inexplicably, as "Run like a weasel." She scored and brought two other runners in with her, and our team name was born. Here we are, the Wismar Weasels:
That's MC, Caroline, Pauli, Anne (I think!) standing, and Kjelt, me and James in front. Kjelt likes baseball cause there's plenty of time, while your team is up to bat, to kick back and relax and smoke a cigarette in the dugout (and sometimes at the plate too).
And the other team, the Wismar Waldmeisters (means "forest master", but is also the name of an indescribable green flavor of ice cream and jello):
A tall guy whose name I don't remember, Andy the Brit, Paris the Spaniard, Robert again down in front and Dave next to him, and I don't remember the names of the two in black either.
I met most of these folks the previous night at James' housewarming party. He just moved into a new apartment, and I think about half of Wismar packed into it on Saturday night. Here's that guy whose name I can't remember again, wearing the utility belt I made for him:
There was also dancing going on in Robert's room, where I taught Kjelt the
Rasenmäher (lawn mower) and the
Einkaufswagen (shopping cart), which translate remarkably well.
So that happened. On Friday (I started the reverse chronological order thing, now I guess I better roll with it) James and MC and Dave came down to Berlin and we saw the sights despite rather grey weather, and James cut his finger trying to open a bottle with a bus seat.
That's kind of the short version...all in all, it was quite the epic weekend. I didn't take any pictures, but the ones I stole from people who did are on my Flickr.
