Tuesday, 15 April 2003 | Colombian tradition

The night before I'd been crammed in a bus that had plastic chickens in the front window, boxes on top, and maracas and ropes hanging from the ceiling. A girl from Colombia was having a birthday, and, in an apparent Colombian tradition, lots of us piled in this tacky, pretty vehicle and were driven around the city: stopping at different venues and bars, getting our feet painfully stepped on, getting elbowed and smiled at, passing around a plate of cheese and bottles of liquid licorice, listening to festive music, dancing, and talking loudly. People from 20 different countries were on that bus, I was told, loudly.

...

I received them in the mail almost two weeks ago: stiff white leather, barely chipped metal hooks, eight blue wheels, and two slightly worn blue stoppers that stick out like buck teeth. They stood in the corner of my apartment for their first week-and-a-half, ignored except for the nosy sniffing gray face that inspected them upon their arrival (like this).

It wasn't until Saturday that it was warm or rainless enough to test them out. I was hoping that the black-topped playground I'd picked out would be empty, but of course lots of people live in this town, people who have kids and people who have been starved for weather like Saturday's.

Threading my laces, bent over on a bench at the back of the playground, I glanced up, alarmed to discover everyone in the immediate area staring at me. I adjusted my headphones, stood up, and wobbily rolled away from the bench on my skates, which were dressed for their debut in debutante white. Figure eights on the pavement, dodging a Heineken bottle on one end and a bottle cap on the other. I decided to forget about being the old, white girl on roller skates and instead concentrate on the music, the seams in the pavement, the Heineken bottle, the bottle cap.

But then a strange thing happened. The young girls, one by one, started shyly tracing my path in their inline skates, following closely behind me, giggling, and stretching out their arms to balance themselves on sharp turns. Two seventeenish-year-old guys came up to me and started mumbling about "old school skates" and how "they cool." A five-year-old boy who was driving his training-wheel-equipped bike around the playground began to follow me, too, and requested that I return the favor.

Later, I took off my skates and I shed the attention, simultaneously putting them both in my backpack.