Firstly, Thursday and the Red Sox game. The girls and I visited the Red Sox Team Store on Thursday afternoon to get kitted out for the game. It was a cavern of a shop with a dizzying array of t-shirts and other souvenirs and we had a great time selecting our supporters gear. Rachel chose a t-shirt sporting the name of her new favourite player Dustin Pedroia (he's her favourite because she's seen his face on a few advertising posters so now recognises him), Izzy chose a glitzy orange t-shirt with sparkly socks on it and I was brow beaten by the girls to choose t-shirts for Barry and I which involved equal measures of amusement and humiliation, as you will see from the photos below.
The game itself was AWESOME!! Fenway Park stadium is an impressive building and is beautiful inside (at least as far as sports grounds go). It looks like a Playmobil model of a sports stadium it's so perfect. It is in fact the oldest major league baseball stadium in the US, built in 1912. There were proposals some years ago to demolish it and replace it with a more modern stadium but there was uproar and the plans were abandoned. We were with a group from the IHI and had a roof box area perched on the top of the stadium with a bird's eye view of the action which was great for getting a good overview of the game. The Red Sox were playing the Seattle Mariners and the two teams are apparently fiercely competitive. Matches tend to be played as part of a series over a few days, presumably to minimise travelling, and Wednesday night's match against the Mariners had by all accounts been an epic encounter with the usual nine innings, three hour match turning into a 15 innings, five hour marathon which the Red Sox managed to win eventually. Therefore, expectations were high amongst the 40,000 capacity crowd but it looked like it was going to be a disastrous result for the Red Sox. At the end of the 8th innings it was 7 runs to 2 to the Mariners and many people in the crowd started to leave. We had heard from other supporters who were long standing fans that the Mariners' pitcher was one of the best in the league and the Red Sox were without their best pitcher which seemed to be the primary reason for the one-sided game. So far as we could see it would have helped if the batsmen could have a) hit the ball b) hit it in the correct part of the field and c) not then get caught out. It surprised us how few balls are hit with scoring runs.
We ended up being the last family standing of the IHI group as we were still enjoying the game whatever the result and the girls didn't want to leave. We were so glad we stayed as we witnessed one of the most amazing comebacks we've ever seen, worthy of a novel or film climax! The Mariners batted first in the final innings and failed to score any further runs so the Red Sox had to score 5 runs in their final innings to draw level and therefore force another innings or score 6 or more to win. It seems that the Mariners may have one of the best major league pitchers but judging by the performance on Thursday night the rest of their pitchers must rank amongst the worst. It's physically impossible for the same pitcher to pitch throughout a baseball game so it reaches a point where the pitcher has to be changed and when the Mariners reached that point it turned the match. They tried three different pitchers through the final innings and they were all as bad as each other enabling Red Sox batsmen to walk to first base on two occasions because of too many foul pitches and allowing the Red Sox to stack all the bases with players on a couple of occasions with the result that a couple of good/lucky hits allowed all the players on the bases to get home. The crowd (and us!) got more and more hysterical as the home runs started to pile up until by some miracle the sixth batsman got to fourth base to secure the required six home runs for a remarkable win. It was apparently a record breaking comeback for the Red Sox and half the crowd missed it - ha ha!!
We are now all hooked and the girls are begging to go to another match as soon as possible. I suppose we have to have some excuse to wear the t-shirts again so I'm sure we'll make another a few games.
Barry and I have discovered that our basic cable TV package includes a channel called NESN which we assume stands for New England Sports News which seems to show live Red Sox matches every night so the last few nights after we've cleared up after tea we've been found in front of the TV with the baseball on. Trouble is the girls won't go to bed until the match is finished which is usually after 10pm! Hopefully the novelty will wear off soon.
Anyway, moving on...
Friday evening Barry and I went to a wine tasting at our local liquor and wine store. We had seen it advertised on a hand-written note on the door to the store so we weren't sure what to expect but thought we could pop in for half an hour. It turned out to be a lady from a wine suppliers company offering tastings of six wines, four of which were Californian, so we enjoyed that and worked her hard to offer other recommendations around the store which she duly did and we duly bought! However, despite Sarah, the wine representative, being lovely and helpful we found it very difficult to take her seriously as her voice was so high pitched she wasn't far off chipmunk level. High pitched voices seem to be a feature of Boston women - we have met many others with alarmingly high pitched voices but Sarah is definitely the most extreme so far. Message to our wine group in Porthcawl - we'll write down some of the recommendations and e-mail them to you!
On Saturday (yesterday) we went to the New England Aquarium at Boston's waterfront. It's a major tourist attraction with a huge central tall glass tank full of sharks, turtles and rays amongst others and surrounded by a spiral walkway. There are touch tanks, seals, penguins and a host of other exhibits as well as an IMAX cinema and whale watching trips. We've taken annual membership as we suspect we will make many visits through the year. We were glad we did as it was very very busy and I'm sure we'll get more out of it when we're out of the tourist season. We went to the IMAX cinema to watch a film about great white sharks which was very educational with Bill Nighy trying to persuade us that sharks are very misunderstood and are actually lovely and friendly as long as you keep eye contact with them. We weren't convinced! Funnily enough, Bill Nighy himself didn't seem to take to the water to test out this theory!
It's been shark week on our Xfinity cable TV so the girls have been watching lots of programmes which seem to feature numerous shark attacks rather than friendly sharks. They insisted on watching Jaws last night after we got back from the aquarium so of course Rachel had nightmares last night!!
We've booked a Duck Tour this afternoon which we're all looking forward to. I'll let you know how we get on.
Observations:
It's really expensive to have a mobile phone in the USA. We were sorting out US mobile phones for the girls and me a few days ago and I shall never again complain about the cost of phone contracts in the UK again. The only contracts available are for two years and even then you have to pay for a phone, albeit at a discounted price. As we're not here for two years we've had to go for a pay monthly option. Our predecessor in the apartment had left a basic mobile phone which we thought we could use for Rachel but as a sim card would cost $30 it was cheaper to buy a basic phone for $20 which came with a sim card. UK companies seem to hand out free sim cards willy nilly. A basic monthly contract for Rachel for unlimited texts and talk time and a small amount of internet use is $40, ie about £28 - it's the equivalent contract that we had for Isabel in the UK for £10 a month!
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