My birthday party is next week. Most of my friends here know this, but not necessarily the people who read this blog, since many of them are not in Mainz. I've invited a bunch of people to a grilling-and-hanging-out party on the Rhine. If it rains, then things will really get interesting since C and I only own four chairs. But we'll make it work no matter what!
But there are two really important things that I want to mention about this party. The first one is something really neat that happened very unexpectedly last week - - last week, after four years, I got in contact with my friend Jiska again. For those of you who either don't know or have forgotten, Jiska was also an exchange student from Germany who was in Surat Thani, Thailand the year that I was there. We were the closest of friends that year - had a friendship that meant and still means so much to me. The friendship was formed under such extraordinary circumstances and the two of us would otherwise never have met, and I think for those reasons it was so unexpectedly wonderful. But after the year in Thailand, we lost contact. There was a brief visit the first time I went to see C in Germany after my year abroad and somehow it was strange between Jiska and me. We were in the middle of reverse culture shock and were both expecting the Jiska or the Emily that we had known in Thailand and I think we were disappointed when we didn't find it. After that, even the occasional Skype calls sort of faded away and we had no contact with each other whatsoever.
Until last week. Last week, I happened to be online on Skype during a time when Jiska was and we got to talking. First it was the usual tentative Skype chat, all typed, no actual phone call, nothing very real being said since there were four years of material to cover - how do you even start to explain how you are when you haven't heard from someone in that long? But somehow, one of us got the courage to pick up the phone and call the other one -- overall, I think I spent about four hours on the phone with Jiska last week. And she's coming to my birthday party.
I am so thrilled to have rekindled this relationship. We talked on the phone about what went wrong the last time we tried to see each other and actually did get a chance to talk about the myriads of things that have happened to each of us over the years. And of course, we spent at least an hour talking only in sentences that started with "Do you remember when..." and reliving the best Thailand memories - things that I was sure only I remembered because they were so mundane but that it turned out had stuck in her mind as well. It was a blast.
So, she'll be coming down from Hannover to come to my party next week. I'm so looking forward to the chance to catch up. That was something really, really unexpected - life's fun when it does things like that!
The other thing I wanted to say about my party is that -- well, frankly, there are so many people coming! I've been thinking about it and at home, if I take into account all fifty states, I have a total of 5 really good friends, people that I could count on to come to that party - and they live in four different states, which means that maybe they couldn't even come to a party if I had one. And when I think about how nervous I was last semester about making friends, I just am so touched and overwhelmed when I think of the at-least-17 people who are coming to this party. I had no idea I would get to be in such a community while I was here, and I'm just SO excited.
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