Thanksgiving bowling day has a much better than expected turnout

Due to holidays back in our home countries we normally expect a dramatically diminished number of attendees at our weekly Thursday bowling outing that we lovingly refer to as DUMBO. This week's bowl-a-rama just happened to fall on a pilgrim holiday that almost nobody cares about and we had a great time with 22 people turning up, many of the first-timers.

There are only 12 lanes at the Lotte Mart where we do our bowling and during these 2 hours or so that we are there they will normally reserve the entire bowling alley for us. This is why we go at the rather inconvenient time of 11am on Thursdays. Would we prefer to have it on the weekend or in the evening? Of course. But then it would be rather silly of us to expect them to save all the lanes for us especially when we refuse to put more than 3 people per lane. Actually, 2 of our lanes, the championship ones, have only 2 people bowling on them.

Vietnamese people tend to see bowling less as a competitive thing and more of a group party thing so they will cram as many people on a lane as possible. Some of these lane crowdings can seem a bit ridiculous as they will have so many people on a lane that it is something like 10 minutes between times that you actually get to bowl. That is not what we are looking for.

There isn't a single person in that picture that isn't part of our organization and there have been multiple times that I have seen a group of Vietnamese teenagers come in and want to get a lane and the manager will not allow them to bowl. I guess I feel bad about this a little bit but we have occupied at least half of their lanes on every Thursday that they were open, for nearly 3 years. Maybe we deserve the added attention.

We tend to not use the lanes on the end because of my own personal bias. I don't like to play when there is a wall on one side of me so we don't use lanes 1 or 12. Other people might not mind but I find the presence of a wall to be distracting.

one funny thing that happened was a pin somehow ended up way the hell down the lane on a very rare and bizarre smashing of the pins and this is where the lack of training and /or incompetence of the staff was exposed. The guy just walked all over the oiled portion of the lane and then proceeded to walk all the way down to the pins and shove the pin through the side in the gutter. Then rather than walk on one of the raised platforms he just walked across all the lanes to the central platform. So not only did he screw up the oil patterns on the one lane but he also tracked oil in front of the pins on 4 other lanes where the wood is meant to be oil free.

To me his lack of intelligence was greater exhibited when he didn't even look to see if we were going to not bowl while he is going this. He could have gotten the crap whacked out of his legs based on how some of our guys bowl.

It is probably this and many other similar reasons that are why the lanes we go to are in such terrible shape. Very few of the lanes would be even considered useable in a serious bowling environment like in Japan or USA and most of the machines tabulate the scores very incorrectly because the pin counters have been broken probably for years.

It is frustrating to have this happen but we do pay something like 50 cents a game so we don't really have much room to complain.

In the end of this day's competitions a new champion was crowned and it is the first time he has ever been the champion of DUMBO. He's quite a solid bowler that has steadily improved over time so I reckon his reign at the top is going to cover at least a couple of weeks!