Melding worlds

Okay, so I was feeling the stress of worlds colliding the other day, but today was a perfect (rare) example of connecting worlds. The first time I lived in Germany we had these awesome friends who were in the same fellowship program, were also newlyweds, lived in our same town, and the wife had been to the same university we were as undergrads. And she's in the same field as my husband. They were (are) awesome people. Talented in arts and languages (he's a photographer), masters of exciting international vegetarian cuisine (that sun-dried tomato pasta salad recipe I shared was from them, and we owe our love of Thai green curry to them as well)... And strangely, she was an exchange student back in high school in the town we currently live in, so we know some of the same people/places. Today they came with their two boys (our boys' ages) because they're leading a January semester study abroad in Germany, and were in the area. It was so fun! We had green curry and chocolate chip/marzipan/whipped cream/raspberry cake (DH has an amazing talent for baking). We haven't seen them since the kids were learning to stand, but our kids all hit it off, and they did things like practice card tricks and watch YouTube programs on string theory and built wild lego creations--the kind of things really smart, mathematically-inclined kids do that other people think are strange. And DH spilled the beans on my writing, and they were interested in the way the whole business works (thinking now, I should have been a little more specific, because they ended up having a little more idea of the details than I'd expected. I should have at least told them about agentquery.com.)  I've gotten a masters degree since we hung out together, had four kids, written a book and a half, and lived in a lot of strange places, and instead of being a dividing factor, they were all things they could get and move forward with. It was really cool!