Bowling

Yesterday was another first for me here in Brazil. I went bowling. Now I´ve bowled on a number of occasions in the US, but I didn´t even know that there was a bowling alley here in Salvador until yesterday.

I called up my friend Mark to see if he wanted to hang out and he invited Vilma and I to go with him and his kids to a park that is right on the beach. He graciously picked us up in his car and off we went. The park we went to is a great place for kids (and adults!). There´s a basketball court, a place to skateboard or roller skate, a craft fair that is always there on the weekends, and a couple of large, plastic playground toys for the kids to play on. We hung out there for a while, drank some coconut water, and let the kids play around on the toys and in the sand. After some time passed Mark asked if we wanted to go bowling! It didn´t take a lot of arm twisting to get me to agree.

The Portuguese word for bowling is "boliche" and that´s what the sign said on the side of the building as we went in. The bowling alley is located a short drive from the park we were at, in a mall called "Aeroclube". Apparently back in the day Aeroclube was considered a really fashionable and fancy mall, but has been in various stages of remodeling for some time now and is basically abandoned. Folks still go there for the movie theatre, but that´s about it, or so I thought. Now I know that they still go there to bowl as well.

Bowling here is pretty much identical to bowling in the US except that all the lanes use gutter-ball-proof gutters and instead of paying by the game, you pay by the hour. But the computerized scoring, people jumping up and down and screaming, and that sound of the balls hitting the pins is exactly the same.

And I scored better than usual, 100 points!

Will I go back to bowl again? Probably not because it was kind of expensive, but it sure was fun!