Billiards, Football and another strike

July 5, 2013

First off, last week I mentioned a bit about many roadside bars, restaurants and billiards places. Billiards if very popular here in Colombia. There are many, many billiards places all over the city, in just about every neighborhood. They may have from 2 billiards tables on up to a dozen or more. Most are just a few tables and a refrigerator for beer. Many of the roadside bars, if you can call them a bar, are just a small building, often no bigger than a typical American backyard shed, and some tables and chairs outside under an awning. The small building is just for storing the beer.

These types of bars are everywhere. The roadside restaurants can range from basically the same size as the bar I just described on up to a full service restaurant. And they are everywhere also. In the middle of residential neighborhoods you will find these small restaurants and bars, and many many small shops of various kinds - bakeries, drug stores, hardware stores, general food stores, variety stores, beauty salons, photo studios and internet cafes. These are generall the size of the apartments are, as they are usually just an apartment converted into a business. Sometimes they are just a single room of an apartment, especially the internet cafes. But being such variety means that a trip to the big grocery store is often not necessary as you can get just about anything you need on your own street - from soap/shampoo/TP to garbage cans/brooms/mops to cement mix/tools to cell phones and computers to general grocery items.

One evening George, Eliana and I were walking to one of the markets and George and I stopped to play soccer with some boys, Eliana went on ahead to buy some rice. There were 4 boys, maybe 8 or 9 years old, playing soccer (football actually) in the street. The ball got away from them and I kicked it back to them across the street. They then kicked it back, and so started a little game betwen those 4 and George and I. The kids had so much fun with that, and George and I were sweating like pigs by the time we stopped. Must've been at least 20 minutes, maybe half an hour of kicking that little soccer ball. We only hit a couple other pedestrians walking by, nothing that anyone got upset about. Here soccer is of course very popular and kids play it anywhere, and with a ball in any kind of condition. I've seen quite a few half-flat balls being used to play soccer in the streets. Would be great if I had a pump to fill them with air.

Today and tomorrow, Thursday and Fridsy, there is a strike here, all businesses of every kind city wide are closed. I saw the buses and taxis are running though. All businesses including the little roadside food carts, everything.

I found a grocery store that is not closed today, yay! I really needed to buy some food. They were swamped on wednesday as people expected the store to be closed so they were doing two days of shopping on wednesday night. When I saw that the line of people extended out of the store, just waiting to get in, I decided I would wait till after the strike to do my shopping, and just live with what I had in the meantime. But the store was open Thursday and I was able to do some shopping.

Happy 4th of July to all you gringos! I hope you all had a safe and fun holiday.

Chao!