Visitors from Serbia

Jenn and Cricket were college roommates a whole bunch of years ago. (coughtwentycough!) Molly went to Jenn and Jim's wedding before she could roll over easily. We haven't seen each other since. Yipes!

Luckily, we've been in touch in part thanks to Jenn's persistent efforts with the yearly surveys a group of us designed for ourselves back in the day. Most of our small group are fairly sporadic about these things, but Jenn keeps us motivated and organized, and it's great. Thanks to the surveys we knew even before they arrived that Jenn's biggest movie disappointment of the year was Pirates of the Caribbean 3, and that her niece accidentally received a bald un-wig instead of temporary butterfly tattoos in her Christmas package, and that Jim had run the Prague 1/2 marathon and was pretty fed up with his job. See? Almost like neighbors.

Lucky for us, Jenn is in the foreign service, and Jenn and Jim are just finishing up the last year of their post in Serbia. Also lucky for us, Jim introduced the alternate long-weekend destination of Paris to Jenn via a date night with a chick flick set in Paris and a good bottle of wine. Go Jim! They hopped the train down from Paris for one of their few afternoons, and we ate, drank, and walked the bords du Loiret.

And we talked and talked and talked some more. Dave and Cricket had all kinds of questions about the State Department, and how one gets posted, what happens once you go, etc. It seemed to Molly about like listening to the news for a bit, so she grabbed some supplies and made a microphone (boasting the monogram NPR, of course) which she used to amplify any and all opinions.

We're sorry their next post won't be near us, but we're glad we're not so far away from their home base. We'll make sure it's not another 9 years between sunny afternoons together!