09 December 2014
Oops. Kinda neglected to write. Game 7 is old news. How ‘bout that Madison Bumgarner, huh? He’s pretty good at the baseball. Also, can someone explain why I saw signs with “#moosedong” on them during the Series? Obviously it relates to Mike Moustakis and maybe his penis, but … what?
Would’ve liked to have seen the Royals win, but it was an even year so it was going to be the Giants.
Last time I sat down to write it was about beauty and ugliness and the two mixing to kind of shit on my day.
The day after the abortive attempt to go to the Casa de la Musia, I went to the Galeria de las Americas, the art gallery founded by Haydee Santa Maria, one of the famous female revolutionaries.
The open exhibit was photographs of the indigenous Wayuu people of Colombia; their wise men, dress, food, culture, etc. Pretty interesting stuff and I meant to look it up when I got back. Oh well.
After walking around the exhibit, a nice older woman told me to grab a cup of coffee and a biscuit from the atrium. There was obviously some sort of function wrapping up, because there were men in sport coats and women in nice dresses but nobody batted an eye at the doofy foreigner in shorts and “GREAT FALLS VOYAGERS” T-shirt, whch was nice.
Then the woman gave a tour of the (closed) upstairs gallery featuring works by artists from the ALBA countries (i.e. Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.) and the Salon Che Guevara which is famous for its tree of life sculpture made by… someone… at some point. I should’ve taken better notes. Hell, you have an Internet connection if you’re reading this. Google it.
We parted ways just as the bookstore/gift shop guy got back from lunch and reopened it for my daily dose of “Ugh, really?”
I got to talking with the guy and after a bit he asked me if there were many “blacks” where I lived. I said that there were more in Florida, where I used to live, and not as many in Great Falls, Mont. I explained there was an Air Force base that created needed diversity, but very few minorities sought out Great Falls on their own; maybe smart enough to not live where weather reports feature “potentially fatal wind chill.”
“But it’s curious. Tu presidente es un ‘nigger,’ no?”
WOAH
I desperately tried to explain everything wrong with that question at once in limited Spanish.
Just because one city in one state has a ton of honkies doesn’t mean we’re racist; we don’t say that word anymore, it’s ugly, rude, racist, etc. …
The guy just looks at me and goes “Si, pero… ‘nigger?’” with a grin.
Ugh. Really?
On the way back it started to rain and a guy was nice enough to give a handful of folks (including me) a ride to 23, so I had that going for me. Which was nice.