gotta love friends :-)

it's been a good evening

after my nightly walk, ben showed up... he took me out for dinner to a cute little hungarian restaurant a block from his new house (he moved out of the campus graduate dorms this week)... it was called csardas... it was extremely authentic of what they did have -- i was impressed... right on down to the dumplings (gnochi) with sour cream :-) i had töltöttkáposzta (stuffed cabbage) and ben had transylvanian goulash.... it was fantastic :-)

after that, we decided to walk around and explore ben's new part of the world... (last night was his first night in his new place)... we walked for awhile and then heard an ice cream truck, so then we went to chase it down, and then found a bridge over a nasty jersey creek to sit on and enjoy our treats (the creek of its own accord was nice... there was just lots of trash varying from bottles to a bike to a bench from the back of a van in it too :-P)...

we walked until ben's road ended at a cemetary and then he was quite surprised at my comment of "dude, i actually really like walking around cemetaries"... we wandered through it... there were a lot of really ornate headstones from the mid 1800s written in hungarian, which was fascinating to read...

finally, we headed the mile back up to ben's house... he now lives with alex (another math grad student, even older than ben), and 3 undergrads who are gone for the summer... ben's the only one home this week while he finishes moving in

highlights at ben's house?
(1) ben has a dart board and i've never played before with real darts so we had a lot of fun with me trying to learn how to play -- i also severely amazed ben with my ability to get darts stuck into weird places around the room when actually aiming for the bullseye... that was a fun game for quite some time
(2) ben gave me X&Y (coldplay's latest CD) as an early birthday present (not a surprise when i commented a week ago that i wanted it after hearing the soundclips on amazon, and he replied with "well that solves that problem, i was wondering what to get for your birthday and was thinking earrings until you got yourself like 5 pair since getting your ears pierced! i'll get that for you and you don't have to, plus i know you'll be pleased with the choice!")
(3) we discovered how exactly to play the non-poker game in ben's new kitchen table... the table that comes with the house is something like this... when left alone, a perfectly good round table, but the top comes off and flips over to be a poker table (ben is MAJORLY into making lots of money playing poker)... and if you just remove the top you have bumper pool... after looking around for rules of the game, we finally got around to playing... ben won once, i won the 2nd game, and we were close on the 3rd, but ben just barely beat me again

it was a quality evening :-)

i get home then to a voicemail from roommate... she's working at a different summer camp every summer in the ELCA's "two by two" program and is between camps tonight and actually has a phone signal, so we spent 45 minutes chatting just now, mostly of her telling me about her adventures of the week and me telling what's actually worth telling of my own :-P it was a good catch-up chat.

now, though, i should be asleep... all this is to say... (1) yay for authentic hungarian dinner :-) (2) MAJOR yay for good chats with good friends and (3) MAJOR yay for quality evenings just hanging out with good buddies :-)

i love my friends :-)

night y'all. :-P