D&L are WOOFERS (volunteers who work for room and board). They are from Chicago. They were our guest workers for a week last month and have been wandering the neighbourhood staying at different places since then. They are smart, young, personable and, interestingly for me, very English-language oriented. They do crosswords, play scrabble and read voraciously. It is not often a pair of young people have such extensive vocabularies and our conversations are often sprinkled with some great but little-used words. I thought they’d be good ESL teachers in Hong Kong and so I offered them a position at our favourite school there and they accepted! This is good.

The girls and Begonia (from our favourite school) have been here for a few days and so we thought it would be good to get the teachers-who-start-in-September introduced to the students-who-are-conveniently-visiting. D&L were at the time on the next island over and I fetched them for a sleep-over yesterday afternoon. Last night was a big Chinese/Gweilo dinner meeting.

It was like a house on fire! They talked and talked comparing notes and cultures, lives and politics, food, living accommodations, George Bush and Mao and on and on and on. I didn’t have to say a thing. I took the opportunity to go to bed at 9:00 to read but I spent a bit of time listening through the walls at the gabfest. It was great.

I like to think I am good company (I am not but I like to think it) and so we have kids come from China visit us every year. But, the truth is, we are old and they are not. This group of girls are over 40 years our junior and there is an age gap, a cultural gap, a gender gap (for me) and a language gap. Sometimes the gap seems large. But the gap is always narrower when the people are closer in age and D & L’s visit was proof of that.

As I get older I may be losing my previous standing (legendary in my own mind and based entirely on Sally’s cooking) as the host with the most. Looks like I am going to have to delegate that function. But this is going to work out just fine.