Food that involves meat

       This weekend, I went into San Francisco (hereafter referred to as “the city” because San Francisco takes too long to type) to visit Ben and to go to a church get-together on Sunday. Ben was still in Berkeley, cleaning up his house-sitting place, so I helped with that. Then we had to move all of his stuff out. He had to lug his laundry hamper all the way to the BART station (inter-city train system) and then all around the city. Poor guy. We then got to the MVS house and I met all of the house again and talked to Alyssa Schrag. It was really nice to see another Bethelite. We talked about how much we missed our mods and how it was hard to be here knowing that everything was still going on at Bethel and we were missing out on it. Then Ben and I went out to eat at a Thai place around the corner. It was one of those places where spending more money doesn't necessarily mean you'll get more food.

          The next day, we hopped on BART again and went to Oakland to meet the First Mennonite church people. They were having a picnic and chili cook-off in Alameda. I don't actually know where Alameda is in relation to the rest of the world, but it's somewhere, and it's an island, and it's a nice place to be. The chili was also super good, mostly because it contained meat (we don't really have that at OCW) and because it wasn't beans and rice. 

I met a LOT of people there, some of which I had met before and forgotten about. I'm working on remembering everyone's names, a feat that is made easier by the fact that at least half of them are Mennonite names, meaning that I don't have to learn any new pronunciations or new last names. There were also a lot of games going on. Ben and I won the three-legged race! It was very exciting, but now I have a bruise on my leg from where the band cut in. There was also watermelon seed spitting, water balloon tossing, and a new game – Bohnanza! It involves planting beans and trading beans in order to plant more beans. It was kind of confusing at first, ultimately a lot of fun. I had a great time hanging out with all of the young recent college graduates of First. There are a lot of them and they are all very nice. They're also almost all from Mennonite colleges, or know Mennonites, so we can play The Mennonite Game really well.

 These are some of the people from First

 Alyssa dommed it up at the water balloon throwing contest

 Ben's great hair allowed him to get maximum amounts of distance in the seed spitting contest.

Rosanna Kaufman (previously worked at OCW), Ben, and Meg learn to play Bohnanza.

It was really nice to be able to get away from the house and hang out with English-speaking white people of my own age. That sounds really horrible and racist and whatever, but I can walk all the way to the BART stop (a mile and a half) and not see a single white person.  And that's fine and whatever, it's just so far out of my realm of experience that it's worth noting.  And I speak Spanish almost all day every day, so to be able to chatter on in English without having to worry about how to conjugate a future reflexive verb is just so nice. And all of the people in my house are over 50, I'm pretty sure, so it's nice to be able to hang out with people who are at the same stage in life as I am.

         All in all, it was a great weekend, and I'm looking forward to hanging out with the church people on a regular basis.