Explaining Baseball to a Russian

There is a French word that has many meanings.
It means to gorge, to eat without stopping, to eat until you can eat to more and then continue eating. Further, this word means to eschew quality for quantity, to switch off one's gag reflex, and literally pour the food down the gaping hole in one's face. It means to demand things that aren't available; to expect things that aren't possible, and to complain at top volume until you can get the next giant forkful of food into your head. This word means to debase one's self publicly, to lower one's own self worth to that of a human garbage receptacle, and to do all of this at warp speed.
This word.... is "buffet".
Every morning, my alarm goes off at 4:45am. I get up in the dark; I dress in the dark; I arrive at work when it is still dark. I do this so I can prepare five kinds of bread, four jams, honey, maple syrup, four kinds of fruit salad, smoked salmon, fresh ham, turkey, skinned tomatoes, three kinds of cheese, whipped cream, muesli, lemons and four kinds of fresh fruit, which all must be ready to go at 6:30am.
They always are. I make a point of that.
Then, they come.
At any given time, there are forty Koreans in the hotel. Twenty leave every day, and twenty arrive, and they all work for Korean Air.
As anyone of these "people" will gleefully tell you, their company pays for their breakfast, so they have decided, in order to save money, that they will only eat breakfast. Really, they don't eat for the rest of the day.
So, they gorge. They gorge like no people I have ever seen. The Americans staying with us dont eat anywhere near as much as these people.
And they have no sense of taste. They load up their plates and mix everything into a big stew and shovel it down. They really don't care what they are eating. I saw one guy with salmon and chocolate on the same fork. Puke city.
And the quantities these people swallow down! I will put out a three foot long plate of smoked Norwegian salmon, and two women will take the whole thing between the two of them.
I put out twelve plates of salmon last Thursday, in one hour. No joke.
And the way they complain! They complained so much to their supervisors (not to the hotel mind you), that Korean Air "asked" that we put out Korean breakfast foods if we wanted to keep our contract with them. So now, we prepare noodles, chicken, kim chee, etc. And now they complain that it is not like it is in Korea. Um, could that be because you are in France? Hi?
And they are all blind. I put out a huge bowl of that great butter I was talking about two blogs ago. It is wrapped in gold foil with a big blue sticker on it that says "BEURRE." I am asked at least twice a day, "Where butter!?" Not only do they ask me in English, but in bad English. At first, I would say, "Oh, its right this way, Madame." But now, I don't even look up from what I am doing. I just point in the general direction of the parking lot, hoping that they will wander out into the French countryside and learn to churn butter for their own damn selves.
It has yet to work.
Other than that, things have been pretty steady. Will is ill, so my Wang just lies there- shriveled and pathetic.... ahem....
This past weekend, I was wandering Paris, and went to see a photography museum near La Bastille. It was really great. Three American photographers. If you have the chance, check out Larry Clark's stuff. He is the guy who directed that movie "Kids" in the late '90's. He also released a book called "Tulsa 1963 - 1971". This exhibition was about that book. Yikes. It was all about breaking though the lie of the mom and apple pie America of the fifties and sixties. For every person he shot that had died, there was painted on the wall next to the photo the method in which they passed. The simple word "dead" appeared next to a black and white of a pregnant teen shooting speed. It was so disturbing.
Another photographer, French born Martine Barrat, had an exhibition called "Harlem in My Heart". It was shots of Harlem in NYC, and it was the exhibition I was least interested in. It was pretty cool though. There are shots of kids learning to box in underground gyms in Harlem in the 1980's. I mean, in the 80's! These are kids too, the youngest "boxer" was three and a half years old.
What a shiny, happy society we come from!
The next day, my friend Inna and I went for coffees in Saint Michel. I was just sitting there, telling her about exhibition when a woman put her hand on my shoulder and said, "Mark?" I looked up and saw this woman Angela from Kendall was standing there with her husband. I was shocked; I hadn't seen her in years. She said, "My husband and I were just talking about you and your wife yesterday." You were? I didn't even remember her name. She is in Paris for the week, just visiting, but what a small world to run into her. Weird. It was cool though, she asked if I could recommend some restaurants, and I did. She asked how to get there, and I could explain easily. Paris is really getting easy to navigate, and I felt like I really was at home, once I saw someone American who had no idea where they were.
Later, it started to rain, and Inna and I ran for cover. We wound up in a little bar in the Latin Quarter called, of all things, Le Guillotine. It was the strangest place. Its floor is covered in real grass. I mean, its sod, but still. That was weird, and it served all these Irish beers, but the basement is a jazz club. So, good beer and jazz with weird people? I am hooked.
While there, Inna asked if she could ask me something about America, being from Siberia and all. I told her "Sure!" and she said, "Can you explain the game with the stick and the square?" I stared at her like I was watching a Korean eat. I had no idea what she was talking about.
"Come again?"
"The game you all play, in New York."
Still nothing.
"With the men in white and the hats?"
Somehow, "hats" did it.
"Oh! Baseball?"
"Yes, yes, that's it. Explain this game to me."
I thought, "Oh, no problem..." but if you have ever tried to explain baseball to someone who has never seen a game, it turns out it is pretty difficult...

"Its not a square; its a diamond."
"No, I have seen field; that is square."

And later...
"But is this fair? One man against nine?"
"Well, they switch sides during the inning."
"What is 'inning'?"
"Ummm, its like a quarter."
"And this game has nine quarters?"

And finally...
"We do not play baseball in Russia."
"No, I know that."
"You win grand baseball tournament; you say you are world champion."
"Yeah, well, I guess the champion of the baseball playing world."
"We could play baseball in Russia and be very good."
"I'm sure you could. Maybe you would be the world champion of the grand baseball tournament."
"No."
"No?"
"No. We don't play baseball in Russia."
"Oh. Well, of course not..."

When I was a kid, my cousin Michael and I watched the movie "Red Dawn" about six thousand times. It was the story of how the Russians invaded Iowa, and how a group of teenagers led by Patrick Swaze and Charlie Sheen ("Wolverines!!") fought back, and pushed those Ruskies all the way back to Moscow. Clearly, a movie entirely based in reality.
Still, I grew up with the idea that Russians were: A. Bad, B. Very cold, and C. Interested in real estate in Iowa.
As it turns out, none of these is true. Still, I guess this conversation about baseball was a wake up call. I mean, I really thought that everybody knew about baseball. Everybody (as in EVERY body) doesn't. It was fascinating to explain the nuts and bolts of this game to Inna. I mean, all the rules and traditions that go into this game still do not explain the love people have for it. It is so uniquely American, and no amount of time rehashing balls and strikes was going to instill in this woman an understanding of the mystery of baseball. There is something unattainable, just out of reach about that game, in the way that there is not about basketball or football. I think it is because baseball is America's game.
It made me think: there is a mystery to being someplace or someone. I mean, I have met people from all over the world here, and I don't know why I am so interested in talking to them about their homes. I mean, what is so fascinating in hearing about Sri Lanka? Really? I think that these stupid questions we ask each other are all vain attempts to figure each other out. In essence, we all look vaguely similar, and I think we presume that we have the same basic values and needs, but there is something that we just do not understand about one another. There is a mystery to us.
Paris is a mystery all of its own. There is something that you just can never understand about this place, its passion or something, that keeps people here, and I think Parisians only know it when they leave.
Its like if you took away all the landmarks and the cafes and people, Paris would just be a big plot of land, but it is more than just its cafes or landmarks or people. It is something more than just "Paris".
These are the places without names; these are the people without faces.
I think its these places we are trying to go when we travel; its these people we are trying to meet, past the obvious, past the front door, past what we know or think we know.
When I got married, we had a quote on the back of the program from the Persian mystic Rumi that makes more sense to me everyday. It went:

Out beyond ideas of wrong and right,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about-
language, ideas, even the phrase each other
doesn't make sense anymore.

True that,
and he didn't even mention baseball.