Last Classes and Missing Baseball

Today was my last day of work in France (if you don't count the private lessons that I am going to continue giving). To celebrate the end of a good school year, I decided that the kids and I would play BASEBALL, as it's an american pasttime. That doesn't exist AT ALL in France.

We had a great time, and I discovered 2 things.

1)Baseball is complicated!

There are a ton of rules, which I unfortunately didn't realize until I was trying to explain the rules to French students, most of whom had never before even seen a bat, ball, or glove. No matter how many times I explained it, they for all some reason wanted everyone who was not on a base to be immediately out when the pitcher got the ball. And they had trouble understanding the concept of "out." They also didn't understand why there needed to be a pitcher and a batter. They thought that the "batter" should just throw the ball into the field. Suffice it to say, when we played, we didn't exactly follow ALL of the rules - they just couldn't understand them. Even their regular teachers had trouble. Oh, and we also played with a raquet, because the bat was just an impossibility for them. And I certainly didn't go into anything like stealing bases or being out by touching a runner with the ball.


2)I miss playing baseball!
Okay, so I never really played baseball. When I was little, I played on a softball team for a few years, and, despite the fact that I remember loving it, I was horrible at it. Then I didn't play again for a while until the softball games at Universite Ste-Anne, where I learned French. Again, I loved it, but I was afraid to get too into it because of how much I remember sucking before. At NYU I participated occasionally in the monthly "Punk Rock Baseball" games held in central park. So the last time I played was in 2004, which was a very long time ago.
Today, showing them how to bat and run the bases, I realized that I desparately want to play again. I played soccer practically MY ENTIRE LIFE (with 1 year of pause my second year of high school and then 4 years of pause at NYU. And then I haven't played since moving to France. But I played between NYU and France while I was at McGill), but oddly enough, I think that I always PREFERRED baseball (or softball - whatever), which I very rarely played. Hmmmm. . .