A week with old friends

This past week we’ve had a couple from home stay with us.  I’ll just call them A and R for short.  They are very close friends of ours; both were in our wedding party and we were in theirs.  They drove over to see some of her family and spend some time with us; to see where we were living and taste a bit of our world. 

Now when I say that they were staying with us, I mean that loosely.  After all our place has only three rooms (bedroom, small study, dining and living combined), plus a bathroom and kitchen.  But we live in a wonderful community of college students who lend out their houses for occasions such as these when they themselves are away on holidays.  A and R got to stay in a place in the unit block next to ours. 

While they were here we took them to the zoo, showed them our college and fed them King Street thai, went to the Rocks Markets and brought them to our church.  They also went to the Powerhouse Museum and saw The Lion King Musical.  They met some of our friends here in our college community and we played a lot of board games. 

It was wonderful to have them here with us and show them a bit of what our life is like here.  Now that they’re gone we’ve hit the books hard with three holiday assignments to complete over the next two weeks!

Getting to know friends

We had some friends, a couple from college, over for dinner last night.  We wanted to get to know them a bit better and we've found in the past that spending time together outside of your usual context can be helpful for this. 

After dinner we played some games (a card game called 'Munchkin' and a board game called 'Smallworld' if anyone is interested).  We love games so it was great to have another couple to play with.  We've got a number of friends in Adelaide who we play games with, and different games with different friends, so we were really excited to find out that these college friends were into board games (particularly the ones we would call nerdy games). 

I think there's something about playing games that helps bring people out of their shells a bit.  We express ourselves more readily because we get involved in the game, and we feel less self-conscious.  At least that's how I feel.  Certainly as one person opens up, relaxes and feels safe to express themselves, they unconsciously give others permission to do the same.  

We like playing games to get to know people.  Do you have things you like to do with guests, or things you do to get to know people better?