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Monday, January 10, 2011

Day 343 – A lebanese kafta under a Mexican palapa


Today we had our first official dinner with friends at the new house. I will consider this the housewarming. Now that I've tested the oven on my favorite easy dish, Lebanese kafta, I conclude that a lot of cooking will be done in this house. I'm excited!

We had Juan (Liang's friend, also a dive instructor) and Javier over. Our menu consisted of the aforementioned kafta and a very simple salad with the honey-mustard dressing I learnt from a friend in Russia (although I had to improvise a bit in the absence of honey, and replace it with sugarJ), and we ate it all on our beautiful terrace under the palapa. For 4 hours we just ate, drank tea, and talked about everything and nothing: traffic in Mexico City vs other capitals, memory exercises, diving issues, languages, rent. Our silly discussion – more of a story exchange really – made me think of the mechanism of conversation development. Conversational pleasure never comes from the subject chosen. It's just that when you like people, when you click with them, you can take any seemingly ridiculous topic and happily go on forever, and I mean, literally, forever. With others, however, it's impossible to get any remote satisfaction from a most "intellectual" theme. Thankfully, our conversation fell under the former category. Oh, and I forgot to mention that it was all in Spanish! Not that I was the most talkative person at the table, but I am proud to report that I was able to share a few little stories of my own. I'm getting there. Definitely getting there.

When Juan was leaving, he paid a Mexican compliment to my cooking: "Ya te puedes casar" – "Now you can get married". Little did he know…

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