From Cali- Entry #2

From Cali- #2: Hello from Cali once again! We’ve been here for a few days and our team has gotten 50% bigger with the addition of Sergio Almeralla. I always love learning something new about my friends- I recently learned that Sergio used to be a top chef. This is great because our hostel has a nice kitchen that we can use to make our meals. Seeing that we are the only people staying here, and the only staff on duty is a guard, we’ve got exclusive any-time access to the kitchen. Last night, we made some yummy quesadillas.

We skated a few more practices yesterday. Morgane and I skated in the heat of the early afternoon. We were the only two skaters around and the track was all ours.


Some of the Venezuela skaters

The track is all mine!

Korea

Chinese Taipei

Chile on the road track
The evening session was a good experience. Morgane, Sergio, and I went to the track. We skated at the same time as the French and the Italians. USA and New Zealand were watching the practice. It suddenly hit me that we were skating mostly amongst the worlds’ top countries and skaters. I enjoyed being there at that moment-


Italy- a blur at night
Yann Guyader (France) looks really strong out on the track. He’s like a cat- very agile with fast acceleration. During one of his relays, he almost fell and did a superb save. We can hear the onlookers cheering and encouraging Yann, letting him know how good is save was.

Sergio, Morgane, and I left the track around 9:00pm along with the French team. We all filed into whichever taxi we could find and headed off. As we drove through Cali at night, we could see that the streets were lined with all sorts of people- selling corn, cooking meat, hanging around, riding their bikes, looking tough, waiting for buses.

If you’re a skater, it’s my opinion that Cali is the place to be right now. The weather at night is just perfect- not hot and not cool. The air smells like car exhaust and food, but the smells are eclipsed by the electricity in the air. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s not, but something special is going to happen. I think you know what it is...


Way off yonder are the mountains- perhaps you can see them in this picture, perhaps you can't, but they are layered, blending more and more into the clouds as they get higher. Soon the stands will be filled with people.
It’s nice to be here early. It’s very nice. With 7 or 8 days, we have time to find the good places to eat and buy food, figure out how to get around and where to find taxis, we can get used to the track and not feel overwhelmed by it all- the track, the air, the skaters, the stands, the lights- it will be nicely familiar when the racing begins.

And it begins soon.