Old Town and Major League Baseball!

Mohit, Esther and I spent Saturday afternoon at Old Town, San Diego. This is the place considered the "birthplace of California". Spanish settlers established the very first mission here, before a chain of missions were built up along the length of much of California. The preservation of many buildings, plus the culture and heritage that we saw was informative and interesting to see. We visited a sheriff museum, a synagogue, and various old-style houses where people were dressed just as they did many decades ago.

On Monday night, Mohit and I took the opportunity to see a Major League Baseball game - the San Diego Padres vs the San Francisco Giants. The game in terms of crowd was a good one - since many UCSD students are originally from the Bay Area (where San Francisco is). While the two of us who had never been to a baseball game nor even seen a full game on ESPN were neutrally just sitting there, the student crowd on either side of us were alternately screaming "Let's go Padres/Giants!!" relentlessly throughout the night. Drunken behaviour was present of course, the night ending with one really loud and obnoxious guy being soaked in a chick-thrown beer cup (although not silenced). The actual baseball itself was not the most exciting since it was a very low scoring game, despite the fact that Barry Bonds (of the SF Giants) was only 20 or so runs away from getting the record for the most runs in a career.

I learnt a lot about baseball that night, and also about how there were so many on-screen interactions with the crowd. These included live candid cams - where some people were completely oblivious, baseball trivia, games, jukeboxes, prizes, loudness meters, and even kiss cams - where one guy got denied real bad (that was the crowd's biggest laugh of the night). This sort of stuff kept everyone excited between innings. I had thought that a baseball game would seem to drag on after a while, but the three hour game went by very quickly with the Padres winning 1-0.

The coming weekend is going to be an awesome one, with another TJ night, a Disneyland trip and the biggest hip-hop dance competition in California - Fusion!