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...Your parents had friends that they had known for a long time. You piled in the car and drove an hour to their house (which seemed like an eternity on the way there). You got to a house in a strange neighborhood, and rang the door, and one of the two answered, and they were instantly laughing and joking like they had known each other for years - even though the friends were complete strangers to you. Maybe the Dad picked you up for a second, which was also alarming as he was still a stranger to you.
The parents sat in the living room with your parents and chatted about topics that you had no clue about. The wife of the couple took you to introduce them to their kids, who were in their bedroom involved with games or hobbies. The first meeting with the kids was awkward, even though you were the same age and of the same culture as them. It was shy and standoffish at first, like two cats who accidentally met in an alley. But soon you both discovered you like the same game, so you start playing that.
When the adults come to tell everyone to come to dinner, you are fully engrossed in the games and it feels like you are best friends with them already. You promise to each other to leave the game exactly as it stands and continue it after dinner. The dinner is always weird food that you never have at home - things like brussels sprouts, which the adults beg you to taste, but you really only rearrange on the plate to make it look like there is a gap in them where you took one. The only thing you do eat is the pile of mashed potatoes because it is fantastic, much better than at home.
The dinner table talk is again that mystifying grown-up conversation that kids have no clue what they are even talking about. Even when they all laugh over something one of them says, you still don't get what's funny. Within a few minutes one of the kids that lives there asks to be excused, and as soon as that is granted, all kids vanish into thin air, and you are back at the game. You have a grand time with the other kids, who were total strangers a mere hours ago.
When the adults come just an hour later to say it's time to go home, it's like someone coming to take you to jail. You hate to leave. You and the other kids promise that we'll play again next week. (Of course it's months before you finally see them again.) Then, on the way back home, the drive back seems to take only 1/3 of the time it took to get there earlier.
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