Unreal

This Sunday, more unreal events happened in my life. Ok, unreal is probably the wrong word since it's happened a few times to me during the trip so far. Can't think of a word to describe it, so I'll just tell you what happened.

I met up with some old family friends of mine, and when I say old, I don't use it very loosely in this case. I've "known" these people since my time in England, which is just about a life time ago. Whom am I refering to you ask? The Timmings family.

As per usual with the previous encounters, this would not of happened if Facebook hadn't been invented. I got in touch with two of the daughters when I was back in Sweden and I was going to be heading over to New Zealand. And I held some loose form of contact while I was in NZ, but then I gave them the heads up when I came to Australia. We were meant to catch up when I first landed in Sydney, but we never had the time due to our schedules were clashing. However, since I don't have a schedule at the moment, I had all the time in the world to adjust to theirs.

After some texting, one of the sisters and I decided to meet at North Strathfield where we would then head up north to meet up with everybody else. Upon seeing her, there was no crazy feeling. Why? I guess cause I saw photos of her on Facebook, texted with her, and even talked to her on the phone, so it was more of a "why wouldn't I see you again" kind of moments. Random. After 2hours driving north, we arrived to her parents house on the Central Coast, and of the two parents I met first was the father. Now that was a surreal experience. I had this image of him in my head, a image from when I was probably 9 years old, a image from my time in the States. The man in front of me was a ghost of that image. You could see all the familiarities in the face, but you could tell that it had been a very long time since we last saw one another. I was no longer looking up at him, I was now looking eye-to-eye with him; I no longer saw a man of who I had small recollection of, I now saw a man from my past in the flesh (who would later share embarressing stories of me). The face was an old face, not the same one that I remember. His clothes were hanging off him, he didn't have the same strength that I remembered. He truely reminded me of my grandfather in a lot of ways. Very interesting experience.

When I met the mother on the other hand, nothing had changed. Same energetic woman, full of life. And with her, this time she had to look up if she wanted to say something. All of the girls in the family are a lot shorter than I remembered, but this is years ago since I last saw them.

We end up having an excellent dinner with snapper, prawns, squid, mushrooms, and salad. Old stories were told around the table, what everybody has been up to, and just having a very nice evening. Everyone there who knew me from before told me that I was the trouble maker and my brother was the sweet one. I beg to differ on this matter - no, wait, there's a lot of truth to it now. Hopefully I showed them that I've changed a bit since then...I think I did....hmmm....

All in all it was a very good evening meeting and catching up with some old friends. Here's a group photo of us...good times.