TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME

BIGGEST BASEBALL MISUNDERSTANDING TONIGHT: I thought people were booing an Orioles player, but in fact they were chanting Luuuuuuke, cos that was his name. It's like when people chant Bruuuuuuce at a Springsteen concert, which I also mistook for booing at first.

I had to do my half day of online US election stuff this morning, then this evening we picked up a hire car and skipped town to go to Baltimore, to watch the Orioles play the Detroit Tigers.

It took about an hour and a half to get to Baltimore in the rush hour Friday night traffic, but it was really exciting when we finally reached Camden Yards - the stadium. We got half-price tickets ($25 each) on the internet that we had to pick up there, so I never quite believed that we were actually going to see the game. I thought we'd get to the collection window and be laughed out of town with our plausible-looking reference number.

But sure enough, it worked (must learn to trust the internet. I hear it's the future) and we had great seats - just 4 rows back from the front and at a really good angle so we could see all the action. The stadium was recently renovated in a kind of cool old-fashioned way and there was a really exciting atmosphere there.

It was a little stressful, finding a food place that sold hot dogs (who runs out of hot dogs at a ballgame?!) and then a little tricksy trying to get our many hot dogs, chips, beer and souvenir jug of Coke back to our seats (I now need to stop being bemused about why I was a bigger size in Lucky Brand the other week!). But once we were settled, it was really good fun and we drank up the atmosphere. We got there in the 4th inning and the Tigers were 3-2 up. But then for about 3 innings, nothing really happened - no-one scored.

In a wonderful twist of fate, my disastrous softball experience came in really handy, as I managed to employ my new-found knowledge of those rules to understand better the baseball game! It was great - I was getting all excited when a batter had been pitched 3 'balls' and was about to get a 'walk' and stuff.

Max has been singing, whistling and faux-trumpeting 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' all week, so was thrilled when the ENTIRE stadium stood up and sang it during the 7th inning stretch! And another fun diversion during the changeover of innings was the 'Kiss-Cam', which was hilarious - cameras would beam shots onto the big screen of a random couple sitting in the crowd and if you saw yourself on the screen, you had to kiss and everyone cheered. It was just really funny, because every single couple's reaction was exactly the same: when the camera found them, they'd still be smiling about the previous couple, then they'd realise with wide eyes and open mouths that they were on the screen and then scrappily kiss each other - invariably with the man being way more into it than the mildly mortified woman.

Eventually people started scoring again and there were a couple of home runs, which were excited and accompanied by fireworks. There were also a healthy number of Mexican waves, which was fun. Max informed me that they get their name from their popularity during the Mexico Olympics, rather than coming from Mexico itself.

I managed to miss the moment when the Orioles stole victory from the jaws of the Tigers, as I needed to go to the loo. But I was back in time to see the Orioles mascot do a victory lap and a spectacular firework display - way better than DC on 4th July.

Our trusty satnav (mercifully better than the one we had in Pennsylvania) got us to Anne's sister apartment very smoothly after the game. She lives about 20 mins drive out of town but we didn't really get much of a sense of the city as we drove through the night. Susan's apartment is in Hampden (she's living in New York all summer, which is how come we could have her flat for the weekend), which seems like a nice neighbourhood. Her street - the excellently named Roland Avenue - is lined with quite scuzzy looking houses with overgrown front yards and we were bracing ourselves for an 'authentic' Baltimore experience, preparing to throw ourselves into life a la 'The Wire', until we realised that Susan's apartment is in a really fancy redeveloped red brick building at the end of the street. Suddenly the thought of A/C and no cockroaches was terribly appealing.

Susan's apartment is an archetypically cool new apartment, with lots of exposed brickwork and a kind of mezzanine level where the bed is. It's pretty small, but way cooler than we were expecting. I must confess to being a little stumped by the lack of TV, but we checked out funny photos of Anne when she was a teenager and chatted, just like in the old days.