And A Good Time Was Had By All

I've been feeling the strains of a lack of a social life pretty sharply the last few weeks. I've been trying to make contact with social groups, recreational groups, volunteer groups without much luck.

I decided to dip into a group I'm already a part of, though usually from DC, the CouchSurfing community. This is an international organization of people who love to travel. They provide free hospitality / lodging to each other and maintain a loose but active network of people around the world.

We've hosted a ton of people in DC and have been hosted a few times on our travels. The biggest challenge is that the group skews heavily to the 20-somethings, which means some segment of the group, honestly, all about the party-party-party-hookup. Blessedly, an even larger segment really is about travelling and meeting people of whatever age.

I've dropped an e-mail to a few people locally to see if they'd be willing to meet for coffee and I'm getting some positive responses. Also last night, a CSer in town for a few months organized a group to go see a documentary over at the University of Queensland, "The Way of Life".

We ended up being 6: 3 Americans, 2 Aussies who've lived in the States for the last 10 years, and a German. The funniest part was that they were all sailors except me and the German (in fact, those 4 sailors sailed to Australia and met in a marina)....and Jeff was at a sailing club meeting!

Beautiful doco. It made me reflect on the "modern" urban lifestyle I live, on parenting, on marriage, on a lot of things. I respect the people who filmed it and the family being filmed.

Afterwards, we eventually worked our way over to Chinatown for a late dinner and a lot of lively conversation. I had the most active and interesting conversation with the 20-year-old Aussie moving back to Brisbane after 10 years in Minnesota and Maryland.

Which reminds me that I really need to quit being so self-conscious about age. :)

I'm feeling....just happier this morning because I went out and I had fun with new people and I think I'm actually developing a more robust social life here in Brisbane. It makes a difference and I'm grateful to Chris (the woman who organized the outing) and to Couchsurfing for providing a venue to meet cool people.