Adam, Bryony and I just returned from a pretty amazing weekend. About a year ago, we were invited to the wedding of Adam's brother's best friend from college...okay, I'll give you a couple seconds to dissect and digest that one. It was a really nice gesture, considering this friend is Adam's brother's friend, and while Adam has known this guy for a long time, they are not particulary close and don't routinely keep in touch. However, the wedding was to take place in Galveston, Texas, and knowing that Adam and I would be living only 3 hours away, the friend and his intended very generously invited us to take part in the festivities.
I didn't have a lot of faith in what Galveston was going to be like. This weekend was a continuation of "The Education of Lauren on All Things Texan," because I ended up being really pleasantly surprised by what a nice coastal city it is. Walking along the beach, jumping in the waves, looking out for bull sharks (hey, I watched "Shark Week" on the Discovery Channel this summmer; I know what to watch for) and watching my young daughter have the time of her life running zig zags up and down the coastline...it was all so amazing.
Other than getting to spend a long weekend at the beach and hanging out in a nice swanky beachhouse, we also got some quality time with Adam's brother Scott and his wife Christine, who just happens to be my BFF in addition to my sister-in-law. In fact, the lovefest between us was obnoxious as we recounted how happy we are to be sister-in-laws, and I complimented her on her very nice boobs. Scott just about wet his pants when Christine--thinking she had busted a seam in the back of her skirt--bent over and asked me to see check out her rear end. Ahhh, girlfriends and good times.
The other high point of the weekend was that the bride is German, and so a large contingent of her family and friends made the trip from Germany for the occasion. You may or may not know that I speak German to some degree and am always anxious to test out my speaking abilities. My first victim was the bride's elderly uncle, who was sitting quietly with his wife not far from me after the wedding. We got to chatting and before long, I was filling him in on my time spent in Germany in 1997 and how my father was stationed there with the army and my brother was born there, blah blah blah. He very sweetly corrected my grammatical and vocabulary mistakes along the way, but paid me the great compliment that my German was good enough that any native speaker would understand what I was saying. I was on a high the rest of the afternoon. The last night, the wedding party and guests had cleared out, leaving only Scott, Christine, Adam, Bryony and me to hang out at the beach house. Oh, and the bride's best friend from Germany! I was a bit shy trying to test out my language skills with someone my own age, but soon enough, she asked me which foreign language I spoke and I couldn't say "German!" fast enough. So she encouraged me to speak and speak, I did! It was exhiliarating, remembering sentence structures, vocabulary and expressions on the fly. She smiled approvingly and told me that my pronunciation--which I've always been very self-conscious of, the damned umlauts!--was right-on. I could hardly believe it. I didn't want the night to end. I was on a roll.
But all good things must come to an end, and now we're back home and the work week has commenced once more.
Schade.
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