TGIF

One of the great joys of moving around and living in different areas are the people we meet, people we may not have come into contact with back in our old surroundings, our lives played out in familiar routines and places.

It was just over a year ago that I met Stephen and Pierre. Stephen and I met through this very blog and started exchanging emails and then a week or two later made plans to meet up. It was that evening I first entered their newly decorated apartment that would become a source of envy for me, lingering even after all these months. That was also the evening they dragged me to TGI Fridays for margaritas. I had not been to a Fridays since I left New York so many years ago.

And now tonight, just over a year later we are returning to TGI Fridays for our last drinks before Stephen and Pierre head back to Scotland and wherever life takes them beyond that. They will be leaving quite a void in our lives here in Delhi. We have gone in cycles of seeing each other a lot, having the filet Mignon at Smokehouse Grill, Blueberry Mojitos at Sevilla or grooving to the Sunday afternoon beats of DJ Ahsish at Aqua while talking trash about the guys trying to play volleyball in the pool, more often than not sending the ball hurling toward our drinks that would then find themselves poured all over our linen shorts and designer swimwear. The drinks always got replaced by the bar, but for some reason they only seemed to get knocked over when they were completely full, so no free drinks for us, just sticky legs and sandals. And then sometimes not seeing each other so often due to their addiction to weekends in Sydney and other exotic locales, but sooner or later they would always return, just a 20 minute drive from Defence Colony, a phone call away from another adventure in cocktails.

I know we will stay in touch and I am confident we will be clinking glasses again somewhere on the globe, hopefully against a backdrop of clear blue water and sandy beaches littered with hunky, scantily clad guys in their Aussie Bum shorts. But I can’t say I am not sad. I will miss them very much. That is the downside to living abroad, most of us are here for a limited time and then we are off to start the process all over again.

But for Stephen, Pierre and I, we will always have TGI Fridays.