Today finished off a great weekend / four days of making new friends and feeling like we have a real life here.
I went back to the 'she' church (which Alison assures me is a gay church, being - as it is - in the heart of the 'gaybourhood', as she puts it), where people were appealing for helpers with the creche and children's groups when term starts again in the autumn, so I reckon I might sign up.
Max met me aftewards and we got brunch at quite a grody place down the road, realising that what we'd thought were typical American breakfasts only actually happen in New York. Same with authentic diners. Boo.
Afterwards, we headed home to watch an episode of the West Wing, as the weather was rotten. However, as ever, one episode turned into three and before we knew it, we'd finished season 1 (within a week!), Bartlett had been shot at and we were left on this massive cliffhanger of not knowing who was hurt.
Because we're renting our DVDs via NetFlix on the internet and are getting discs mailed to us, we calculated that, by the time we'd returned the disc we'd just watched and they'd dispatched the first disc of season 2 to us, it'd be Thursday. This was unacceptable. We needed our fix. We were desperate.
So, with all the shame of a crack addict, we scuttled over to Anne's flat down the hall to take her up on what I'm quite sure was a hypothetical offer of borrowing her copy of season 2. Again, we needed our fix.
Anne looked really worried as she opened the door and saw us standing there sheepishly - as if something terrible had happened - but when we explained what we were embarrassingly asking for, she burst into fits of laughter and invited us in.
Within a minute, we each had a glass of red wine in our hand (it was 3pm) and were sitting on Anne's sofa, chatting away. She is just so nice. She was telling us all about her and Hugh (including how they split up last year then went to therapy and are now back together, which made Max and I squirm in our British but-we-only-just-know-you-ness) and about how her cousin/roommate Megan was at a Radiohead concert this evening (which we could've guessed, as we were woken this morning with Stompy-like noise coming from her room behind our bed, and Radiohead music blaring out).
Part of Anne's finals for which she is preparing involves building a website with two classmates. They decided to make a cookery website specialising in tactile food and Anne was busy making some special cookies to accompany their presentation tomorrow. So we helped out by unwrapping lots of Reese's peanut butter cups, while chatting away. The photos on the website are great and it turns out Anne took them with a special macro lens on her camera, so I'm really hoping she can be my photography Yoda and teach me the ways.
It was absolutely pouring it down outside, so it felt lovely to have nothing to do all afternoon but sit in our new friend's flat, drinking wine and shooting the breeze (with one eye at all times on the next West Wing boxset...).
A little later, Anne's classmates arrived and they both seemed really nice, too. One reminded me of a mix between Juno and my friend Kate and she blew my mind with talk of felt tip pens especially designed for drawing on food. Cooooool. She also drew our attention to her recipe for candy sushi on the website.
As I was helping Anne out in the kitchen and we were just chatting away, she suddenly gave me a massive hug and said how nice it was to meet Max and me and how it really felt like we could be proper friends, rather than people who pass the time together or just wave to each other in the hall. I feel the same - it's really nice and we're so lucky. I didn't really think we'd meet people like this here.
We left them to it as they debated whether they had time to include the Eat Yer Face jelly mould in their presentation and scuttled back to ward off the torrential rain with some more sweet sweet West Wing crack.
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