The Silverbloggers Chronicles - #21. Pastimes
My mother preferred us to stay indoors. In her view, the street was too dangerous, and she always warned my brother and me about the trouble we could get into if we spent too much time outside. Perhaps that's why she always made sure to find us a hobby to distract us during the long hours after school.
Among the things my mother bought us were Chinese checkers, a game that I thought was very nice. There was one problem with that game: it was very easy to lose the marbles that came with it, and if even one was lost, the game was incomplete.
Much simpler was Ludo, which was played with colored pieces that had to cross the entire board until each player got all four of their pieces to the finish line. More than once, my brother and I lost one of the pieces, but that wasn't a problem because we could replace it with buttons that my mother used to put on our school shirts. I don't know why my brother and I found it so easy to pull the buttons off our school shirts.
I fondly remember that one of my favorite pastimes at that time was doing jigsaw puzzles. I had two: one with 100 pieces that was a map of Venezuela and another with 200 pieces that was a slightly larger map of the American continent. My mother had bought us those two puzzles so that we could learn some geography while entertaining ourselves for hours on end.
We also had to be very careful with the map puzzles; if a piece was lost, the map would be incomplete.
My mother wouldn't let us play with them on the floor or on the dining room table. There was a small table in the living room that was big enough for us to easily put the puzzles together. We placed each piece on that table, taking them one by one from the box. At first, it was quite difficult to find the right piece, and my mother would give us a hand by sitting with us for a while to help us put the puzzle together.
But with practice, we began to memorize the pieces and found ways to put the puzzle together more quickly. I learned to orient myself by the names I read on each piece.
I came up with a system where I put the puzzle together in parts. I organized the map of Venezuela by states, placing the eastern ones on one side, the western ones on the other, the northern ones, the southern ones, and so on, forming the picture. There came a point when I could put the puzzle together in a few hours using that system, so the challenge was to put it together in the shortest time possible.
Later, as I entered adolescence, I lost interest in those games, and it was time for Monopoly, which I played with some friends from the neighborhood whom my mother was very fond of.
We always played Monopoly at my house, two friends, my brother, and me. We usually played on Friday nights, starting around seven and finishing around midnight. Playing Monopoly had a very special appeal because my mother always left us a thermos of hot chocolate with some sweet bread. Spending those long hours playing with friends and drinking hot chocolate with sweet bread was really the best.
Nowadays, my main hobbies are reading and music. I like all kinds of music genres, and the same goes for reading. I read almost any genre with equal interest, although I'm not very fond of horror stories; I've never really liked them very much...
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Translated with DeepL.com (free version).
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Chinese checkers and monopoly. Those were the days. I couldn't stand board games any longer though haha.