thank god for new friends

one of the guys on ben's team is called cico ("chicho").  he's a little older than we are, from serbia, has played in the nba, lived in canada, the list goes on... he has a pretty interesting life story.  at nina's 1st birthday party on christmas eve, i met stasa ("stasha"), his girlfriend.  her english was so perfect that i assumed she was canadian and they met while he was living in toronto.  later, i learned that would be his ex-wife.. talk about putting your foot in your mouth!  (i obviously apologized later to stasa... who completely understood).


anyway, stasa and i crossed paths again at a basketball game after eboni left and exchanged phone numbers & full names (for facebook... what else).  a couple days later, our phones shut off because we left them without credit for too long and the company wanted to reuse the phone number, so it was lucky that we had thought to figure out the facebook thing too.  because of the phone situation, we had missed out on a few days where we would have been able to hook up, but decided to just chat the next day at another game about what we could do to get together.  we would up saying that we would meet at the gym the day after the game and head for coffee while the guys were practicing.


the next day, we met and headed off to second cup, a coffee shop, and spent two hours chatting away over frappes.  talk about an international friendship made easy, the language barrier was the least of our problems.  over coffee, we chatted about tons of different things and conversation came so easily.  


i thought cico's history was an interesting story, but stasa's might just top it!  i learned that her father, zarko paspalj, was one of the first european basketball players to play in the nba.  when stasa was born, he was still playing basketball, so she grew up in a few different countries - none of them serbia.  the majority of her childhood was in greece, and greek was her first language, but she went to international school and honestly might speak english better than i do.  it wasn't until 6 years ago that she even learned serbian!  (she's fluent in that, too, now).  not quite a boring upbringing, eh?


you can imagine that with all that, we had quite a lot to chat about... the hours flew and before we knew it we had to head back to the gym to meet up with the guys.  we decided to keep meeting up frequently, sometimes for shopping and sometimes for coffee, and the void of not having eboni and irie around anymore grew just a bit smaller.


what's the old childhood rhyme?  make new friends, keep the old.....?


xox k