Joel and I had the big pleasure of having "The Bretas" over for 3 days visiting us. Those were fun days, with so much laughter, stories up dates, some sacrificial massages of course, tourism and a serious gastronomical galore with very good food and excellent wines... oh man... the three days felt like three weeks or even three months!!The story behind our friendship is interesting and quite instant. Back in 1996, the girls, Joel and I were invited to a river rapids birthday weekend, up the mountains near Rio. We were all staying at a hotel who organized it all for us. We went and even took the dog we had at the time, a beautiful Old English Sheep Dog, called "Candy". She loved being part of our weekend (or better saying, she behaved as if she loved it), behaving very well and made sure we were all well licked when we got back from the rapids, cute her.
Anyway, the four of us didn't know everybody there and Cecilia, the lady on my right in the picture above, was one of them. At a certain point of the weekend, we were all sitting talking about this and that, when Joel mentioned we were going through the frustrating phase of looking for a house to buy... you know... when you see a house you love, it's location you don't love so much, when you can pay for it, it's ugly, when the location is great, the house is bad and on and on and on the story goes.
Cecilia then said that when she left her house for the weekend, she noticed her neighbor had just put their house in the market for sale and promised she would call us on Sunday night with the details of the person in charge. Being the little terrestrial angel that she is, voila, by Sunday night we had the name and number to call on Monday morning and a few days later, we made an offer, which was accepted and we moved in July 15th!!!
Cecilia introduced us to her great family and trust me, hours and hours of loads of laughter followed there after.
However, the funny side of life showed its face and exactly 13 months later we moved to South Africa and were no longer Cecilia's neighbor, sniff sniff.
In spite of this short lived neighboring, we became very good and very close friends. Cecilia has visited us in all three continents we lived after that and her brother and sister in law (the couple in the picture above) have also visited us in Jo'burg and now here in Panama.
Funny how good friends remain "in sync" no matter their geographical spots. I remember a day last year, during our passage through Angola, when I was really very completely down and the phone rang... Cecilia was on the other side! Just perfect timing!!
So, here it is for true and fun friendship!
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