The One with the Crawdad

So today was baseball :) I did nothing all day, except lie in and then go on Facebook. I did stop briefly to get food, then at five we were met by the bus to take us to Hickory, which is about a mile away from Boone. The drive was amazing - gorgeous and beautiful, because we were so high up in the mountains.

We got to the L.P. Frans stadium on the Appalachian bus (one of many regularly seen around campus running various sportspeople to games and classes to trips). We got a special mention from the announcer who noticed our bus and welcomed the international students from Appstate!! WOOT WOOT!!! The game itself started off with the national anthem being sung, whereby everyone stood up and the men took off their hats and placed them on their hearts. It sounds corny but being there with an entire stadium singing together was pretty special. The baseball begun with the Asheville Tourists batting first (a baseball game usually lasts for ten innings). Once we had figured out which team were which (both wore red t-shirts, but the Crawdads wore white trousers whilst the Tourists wore grey), we cheered at the appropriate times. It was quite fun, although there are lots of breaks and pauses for adverts and random messages from the announcer. One of the highlights of the evening was when they catapulted hot dogs into the crowd (yes, they actually got a catapult onto the pitch and fired foil-wrapped hot dogs into the cheering people). Everyone rushed to get them, and James (another English international) got it, pushing children out of the way and spilling beer on them in the process).

We got food and drinks, and sat around at the top part of the stadium overlooking everything. We met the mascot (a crawdad is kind of like a lobster) and had pictures. It started to rain so we all took cover, but the baseball continued through the rain. When it eventually slowed to a drizzle, the English ventured out whilst everyone else stayed under cover. We left early, at around the sixth inning, because there was a party that everyone wanted to get back for. But it was a really fun night. We got free beach towels emblazoned with the Crawdads logo, and all the way back on the bus we listened to a radio station from Charlotte (which played lots of British music including Sting, Elton John and Natasha Bedingfield).