Best Weekend Ever: Part I

The past three days easily qualify as some of the busiest and most rewarding days of my life so far. The hardest part about retelling them will be trying to preserve the anonymity of my friends (you never know what random web crawlers might end up reading this). I’ll primarily stick to first names, using an initial for the last name if necessary, so that those of you in the know understand who I mean.

After work on Friday, I couldn’t get home quickly enough. You see, I had finally organized an event, suggested by my mom, where three of my friends (Chris V, Emily, who had come to visit Chris, and Erin) who had traveled abroad during the previous semester would join my family for dinner and share their experiences with us and each other. I had heard snippets of their travels before Friday, but this dinner provided an occasion for each traveler to summarize the whole of their escapades in one gloriously epic evening of storytelling.

Admittedly, the idea came out of my largely selfish desire to get a feeling for what studying abroad entails and also a need to satisfy my mother and I’s insatiable curiosity about it all. As it turned out, my mother led the vast majority of the discussion, probing each of my friends with directive questions that kept the conversation moving, eliminating any chance of awkward pauses. Even better, she asked most of the same questions that I had, or reminded me of my own, so the evening virtually ran itself, thanks to her.

I wish I could remember all the stories that were shared, but as Emily mentioned offhandedly last night (I’ll get to that later), the stories are theirs to tell, not anyone else’s, so perhaps it’s better this way. My friends told their stories in their own unique voices, and much would be lost if I detailed their stories here. Plus, while I do remember random excerpts, I don’t want to do their stories an injustice by reinventing them according to my flawed recollections. So I won’t. I guess you’ll have to ask them yourselves if you want to know more. I wish I had recorded our banter, but I didn’t have the prescience to do so.

Anyway, on to Saturday. The previous evening, Chris and Emily were nice enough to invite me to tag along with them on their trip to Ocean City. I gladly accepted, as I hadn’t been to the beach yet this summer. Come Saturday morning, that’s exactly what we did, after we handled a bit of a, um…, ahem, “wardrobe malfunction” (whether it was Chris or Emily or myself, I’ll never tell!). Once we found a parking place that wouldn’t get us towed (I think it was around 30^th Street), we frolicked onto the warm (but not hot) sands. Frisbees were brandished, and I got to showcase my willingness to run myself silly in the pursuit of a spinning disc.

Eventually, we tired of our inability to toss/catch a frisbee more than a couple of times in a row and tentatively entered the slightly chilly waters. We braved those for about an hour, making heroic poses and showing our strength in the face of the adversity of the sea… or something like that. Then, following a quick lunch, Chris and I constructed a fortress to defend the world’s smallest, most precariously located, impoverished, and imaginary village, conveniently located where we had set up camp. Of course, we were only delaying the inevitable for that poor town, but how could we have done anything less?

Wow, that last story took on a life of its own. I'm not sure what came over me. :-P For now, I want to get to bed at a decent hour tonight, so I'll finish relating the events of the second half of the weekend in a day or two.