The long awaited swim meet finally arrived! This weekend, my team competed in a swim club about 15 minutes away via car in Club Vialidad. There were about 8 teams, each team bringing between ten and a hundred swimmers. Las Focas (the seals), which is my team, took 32 swimmers to compete. In my age group, the available events were fifty meters in each stroke, and a freestyle relay. I competed in the five event.
The meet started on Saturday morning with a little parade at 7:30am. Which meant that I got a total of two hours of sleep the night before, which was entirely not my fault. I´ll explain that later. Anyway, the parade was just a little display of each team. The Focas definitely had the most team spirit, all with matching shirts, group cheers, and a very loud snare drum that was great for about the first hour of the meet, but realllllly annoying after ten hours of sitting on a bench.
Warm ups started at 8:00am, with our team of 32 swimmers plus another team of about 12 swimmers all in one lane. And as any swimmer knows, 44 swimmers in one lane is a disaster. Especially when there is little knowledge of the amazing "circle swimming" or the general custom of not diving into a pool when there are fifteen people right below you. So I got to do a total of 200 meters with no flip turns and no dives.
My first event was the 50 free. It went well, except for the fact that I almost slipped off the block, which was super inclined and slippery. I wasn´t the only one, though. Pretty much every person slipped a bit as they stepped up. My flip turn was pretty bad, there were no lines on the bottom of the pool to show where the wall was and so I didn´t realize I actually was at the wall until about my head was about .2 seconds away from being cracked open. But it all ended well and I got first, hitting the wall about 3 seconds before the next girl. The 50 meter breaststroke was pretty uneventful as breaststroke typically is for me, but suprisingly enough I was able to get third, probably for the first and last time in my swimming career. Those were my only events on Saturday. I was actually in the bullpen for my 50 back, but it was getting dark so they cut the competition at the event before, number 111. I was 112. So I was pretty annoyed seeing as I was super ready for my backstroke and I didn´t want to be first in the morning. But oh well. Then they started giving out the medals, and I swear, that is the slowest awards process I have ever seen. It took an hour and a half just to get through freestyle awards, and we didn´t even get to the breaststroke. Ah, and lunch that day the team bought empanadas and we went to the Aguara Club (a hockey and rugby club about two blocks away where I played hockey before that team kinda just stopped practicing) for lunch, water balloon fights, and card games. When I got home that night, I went to sleep at 9pm, the first time all summer vacation that I went to sleep before 2am.
The next morning we were back in the pool at 8am. I was the first person in the pool for warmups because I really wanted a chance to practice a backstroke flipturn because I hadn´t had an opportunity to count my strokes from the flags since last season. Right off the bat was the 50m backstroke, and I must say, I crushed it. I know my time wasn´t the best but I finished a good half pool in front of the others. Later was the 50m butterfly, and that was my first time competing in a butterfly event since the 25y fly when I was 8. I took first in that too, though I was really tired at the finish. After that was the freestyle relay. For the relays here, all the teams are mixed, so it has to be boys and girls. I was on a team with the three fastest guys. In the relay, we had to compete against the "promocionales", which is a higher level than us. It´s kind of hard to explain, but teams compete either at the school level or promotional level. The promotionals are faster and the officials are more strict about disqualifying. So everyone on the team, being supportive as usual, told us that we were going to lose by a full pool length and everyone was going to laugh. But in the end, we ended up getting third by a finger length, beating two other promotional teams and getting a medal. It seems like that was the first time any of our relay teams has placed in a race in a couple years (seeing as we always compete against the higher level) and so when the last swimmer touched the wall we all jumped in the water and cheered and got yelled at by the official and didn´t really care. After that we had the whole awards ceremony, which lasted for hours. Our team did really well, in every event we competed in, we medaled. Of course, we should be competing as a promotional team, and I think we will for the next meet, which means that we will probably get knocked off our high horse. But it was a lot of fun even though we finished exhausted and sunburnt and hungry. But today we don´t have practice, so we can rest a bit.
Other news: today I should get registered for Italian. That should be two days a week. Valentine´s Day was super romantic here, I went with a couple friends to Señor Panchos (aka Mr. Hotdogs) which is obvioulsy a classy, candlelit, cozy restaurant ideal for couples on Valentine´s Day. Friday night I went to a concert to see the band Agapornis, which is a group that copies known songs but changes them to have a cumbia style. See the link below. And the concert started at 10pm, so, being an American as usual, I figured a concert that starts at ten ends before midnight, I get home, sleep a solid six or seven hours, and then head to the meet. But apparently it doesn´t work that way. A concert that starts at ten means that the opening group arrives at eleven, then three other groups play until 2 in the morning, then the announcer stalls for about a half hour, then the actual band arrives at 3, plays for a half hour, and goes. And then I had to walk a half hour to get home, I had to get my swim bag ready, and, at the god awful hour of 4:15am finally go to sleep. On top of it all, every group that played before Agapornis played Agapornis songs, which meant that after four hours of that, when Agapornis finally arrived, everybody was sick of those songs and just wanted to go home. But no way that my friends and I were going to leave after paying a whole five bucks for the concert. We did have fun though, kind of in that sense of "oh my gosh, remember that miserable night that we waited four and a half hours on a cement bench for that band to arrive?" type of have fun. Apart from that, there´s not much news. The exchange students come in about five days! And school starts next week.... bleh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSsIbOUoUv8
Here is the link to one of Agapornis´s songs, I think this is the only one in English. But as you can see, they take popular songs and make them more like cumbia.
Ah, and I forgot. Last week, around 8:30pm, I was minding my own business and making my normal trek home from the pool. Imagine me, the sweet little American, totally inoccent and trusting and whatnot. Anyway, I was on my way home when all of a sudden there was a big splash of water in front of me. And I heard laughter. And then a splash behind me, and next to me, and in front of me, and all around. And I realized that I was under a water balloon attack. Now, it isn´t uncommon to be walking down the street and have people talk to you or yell at you or whatever, but a water balloon attack? In six months nothing like that had happened. But like everybody says, if someone is harrassing you just keep walking and don´t pay attention. So I just continued on my way, water balloons coming from all sides. After about a block, I thought they had stopped, and I looked around and saw nobody. And I continued. Until three balloons hit me simultaneously on the head, back, and legs. And at that point I turned around, saw three guys about 13 or 14 years old, and I used some choice words in English. And they got kind of confused and ran off. I finally arrived home, and after dinner I mentioned what happened to my aunt, and she broke down laughing, and explained to me that the water balloons are a tradition of Carnival. Carnival is a festival that is a few days long, though I still don´t really get what it is besides an excuse to just have parties. But anyway, for the next few days I took a different road to go to the pool, and after that took my normal route. Until a couple days ago when they got me again with the ballons on the way to the pool. And I was soaked by the time I arrived there. And everyone laughed and laughed and laughed. Now, thankfully, Carnival is over so I can go to the pool in peace.
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