The Tower of Babel
Turns out that all-night fiesta took a siesta during the Copa América. So did the car horns. And all the sirens. Those weird sirens that sound more like Martian space guns than actual sirens. But as the city retreated indoors to rally behind Colombia vs. Argentina in the quarterfinals, the vuvuzelas replaced the fiesta, leaving their piercing mark in the night air. I didn’t follow the game at all, but I hardly needed to. The city – the country – shouted in unison after every attempt to score.
Yali woke that morning heedless of Colombia’s eventual elimination in the Copa América. After all, the world was never a happier place than when he got to scrub his face in his daddy’s beard.
It was late in the morning. Prepared to remain confined to our room for most of the next three days, it was surprisingly easy to keep Yali entertained. He had me spend a considerable amount of time before lunch expressing the difference between “neigh” and “naa naa” by pointing at photos of horses and goats in his picture book.
He’s already become the little comedy man. Happy dances for meals, pretending to fall asleep just to be funny. He knows what gets a laugh out of his new people.
As the rain fell again from across the mountains, we spent awhile catching up with the Silverspoon side of the family, where Puck was wrapping up Week One of his extended summer vacation.
We ended the call over an hour later so Oxbear could walk to the store for dinner. There’s something about two very white people with American accents walking around with a brown baby in a tourist-absent city that draws a little too much attention. Plus I had only one copy of a letter offering proof that we held temporary custody of the cute little niño we carried around with us. So Yali and I stayed at the hotel.
Fortunately, everyone has been friendly. They laugh when they discover we can’t effectively communicate with one another, laugh, nod, drill off some more Spanish where we can usually understand a word or two and nod in agreement. “Sí, sí.” Suddenly all those phrases and the gradually bulging vocabulary only make things more complicated than helpful when attempting to explain that, “No, we don’t need our bedding changed today, but thank you anyway.”
Meanwhile, Yali’s English vocabulary had increased to maybe three words: “Mama”, I heard one “Daddy” in there, and “banana”, or “nananananananana”.