Oh, Marie!

I love my friend Marie. We have tons of fun together, and are able to laugh at each other and with each other. That's a cool thing. This evening we had dinner at Marie and Thayne's house, and as usual, things got crazy. Our friends created a delicious meal for us. We had pulled pork, except we call it pull-apart pork because of my infamous phrase-twisting sister. We also had a delicious salad made with cucumbers from the back yard, and some delicious Colorado-grown sweet corn. Yum!

It seems like something always happens when we get together that makes us laugh ourselves silly. Maybe I am a bad influence on Marie. Naw, she must be a bad influence on me...okay, we just bring out the best in each other. While Marie was eating her corn on the cob, she kept getting one little bit of corn on the same corner of her mouth. Every time she'd try and catch it with her tongue, it just got pushed closer to her cheek. Marie had had enough. When she realized she had yet another corny stowaway on her face, she just swiped over it with the corncob and went on eating. We laughed so hard, I thought Trent would fall off of his chair. I, on the other hand, inhaled my vinegary salad dressing, and got all choked up over the situation. Nothing says fun like laughing till you choke, right?

Shortly after dinner, Marie and I went on a brief walk. She and Thayne had gotten a lot of corn, just picked yesterday, and wanted to share some with some friends on the next block. As we were walking home, I told her that I had found a bunch of Euro coins while straightening a closet. We wondered about the current exchange rate. She mentioned the rate when we traveled, and then it happened. I was suddenly transported back to Budapest. Marie said, "Now, when we were there, it was 6000 forints to the dollar, right?" I burst out laughing. "Marie the accountant strikes again! Numbers are my life! Numbers have been very good to me! Um, Marie, when we were there it was 1000 forints equals 6 dollars." 

We continued to get a good laugh at the memory of exchange rate confusion in Budapest. If you haven't read where I mentioned this before, there were four women on this trip. Marie, the accountant, my sister, Liz, the banker, Marie's sister-in-law and our dear friend, Julie, and yours truly, Katrina. Before we took the trip, I wanted to make sure I could quickly figure out in my head how much I was spending in US dollars when paying in Hungarian forints. The exchange, as I just mentioned, was six dollars to one thousand forints. Pretty straightforward, right? Julie and I would look at a price sticker and say, "Oh, 2,500 forint, so that's $15.00." No problem. Then there was Liz. "This costs two thousand dollars!?" And Marie, "Okay, this is 1,500 forints. 1,000 forints is six dollars, so this would be..." By about the second day, at this point Julie and I would act like we were yelling at them. "Okay! 1,500 forints is $9.00, okay!?" Or, "Not two thousand dollars, two thousand forints! Twelve bucks!"

Many laughs are still had at Liz and Marie's expense, but they take it like champs. So when Marie had it totally backwards, I had to tell her that if the exchange was six thousand forints to one dollar, we'd better get to Hungary, and quick. "Even if we're broke, Marie, at that exchange rate, we could live like kings!" A short while later, we were on our way home with some fresh ears of corn, "pull-apart" pork, and other delicious treats. But the best thing we had this evening was the company of good friends. And some more fun memories to savor!