Ten years ago, a colleague from my team announced to me a private project in the middle of the year, which also required my involvement.
He received an invitation from his friend to travel to Sydney, Australia during the New Year holidays.
As it is a very long way from Europe (and quite expensive), the request he made to me, to combine the holidays with a complete annual vacation and to take a month and a half for his vacation, seemed OK to me.
Since I know that it is a really serious trip - I did not travel, but I listened to the stories of friends who moved to Australia, I agreed to meet him and reorganize the rest of the team and our regular business obligations, as well as the obligations regarding the projects we were involved in, so that he could be away from the beginning of December until the middle of January.
He went to Australia from a severe winter with snow (with temperatures below -10掳C) to the southern regions, where he spent time on the seashore and enjoying house parties with barbecues and beer.
I remember as if it were yesterday, when he returned to Belgrade, to the cold and harsh winter, he cursed that he didn't stay in Sydney longer, at least until it thawed here.
That adventure of his came to my mind today, while I was reminiscing under the fog covered parking lot, when I read the topic in which galenkp asks us:
If I invited you to my house for a BBQ, would you come or not?
My colleague accepted the invitation of his childhood friend and was his guest for a month and a half during the summer period.
Even though we don't know each other personally, with all these weekly exchanges of words and pictures through comments and posts, we have gotten to know each other so much that if I received an invitation like this to hang out with a barbecue under the open sky, today, when it's summer in Australia, I would accept without a second thought.
But only as an option if I had the ability to teleport like the heroes of the Star Trek movie do.
Like in sci-fi movies.
A trip of this type, from end to end of the world, with a layover via the Emirates, would not be acceptable to me even if the menu included kangaroo meat (which I read is very healthy due to its low fat % and plenty of protein).
The length of the trip would only be acceptable in the case of a multi-week stay, not just on a barbecue day.
Although I am sure that even that one day would be full of impressions and would remain in my memory forever.
And if I showed up at the house of a man I don't know personally (except through Hive), with the previously promised wheelbarrow that I had chosen as a gift for his new SUV and a package of my favorite coffee (which is also his favorite drink), and handed that gift into his hands, I think the socializing could begin.
I would accept a cup of extended espresso without sugar, followed by a bottle of cold Fosters beer for refreshment, and I would offer to roll up my shirt sleeves and help with the grill (although I'm sure the host, master of the grill, would not need any help 馃檪).
I'm almost certain that we would have found a few common topics, and besides enjoying the food prepared on the grill, I don't think I would have been able to resist asking the host to take me on a short nature tour after lunch, where they would drive in one of his all-terrain vehicles, if he could show me his collection of weapons and maybe even let me shoot a few rounds.
But that trip, across continents, seas and oceans, is an obstacle that is currently insurmountable for me.
I don't have a lot of free time, but I always accept my friends' invitation to barbecue, when we fit in.
Then we sit by the grill, drink beer and enjoy talking.
We don't drive SUVs, shoot guns and eat kangaroo meat, but a day spent with a barbecue is worth its weight in gold.
The same one, worth its weight in gold, would be a day next to the barbecue as a guest at galenkp, in Australia.
Maybe someday, if a teleportation machine is invented 馃榾
And all this talk about the barbecue, so far away in Australia, and without my friends' invitations, made me hungry. so I decided to stop by a restaurant near my home and indulge in the skills of a grill master on this gigantic machine.
The result, kebabs and sausage, with fries and onions as a side dish, a great combination to end this working week and go on a well-deserved weekend.
