Tonight is gonna be a night very different than the others. It’s been now 3 years that some of our friends celebrate theirs birthday party together. And this year it couldn’t be different.
Three of some friends or ours celebrate their birthdays in the same day or in very close periods. As everybody know each other it’s already a tradition to do of this coincidence a reason to make bigger party. The problem, of course, is the amount of people invited and the mess we do together.
Quebecers are, mostly, calm, discrete and silence people. Brazilians are, how can say it, ahm, exactly the opposite. It wasn’t few the occasions we got together and our reunions made people at least get very scared with what I used to call a “chicken massacre” or an “Arabian market”. At least that’s how I imagine people see us when we’re together. The first time we decided doing something of such magnitude was sometime we had just arrived in Quebec. On those days we lived in a 3 floors condo; me, Márcia and Matsuru on the second floor and Marmé and Tati on the first one. We decided doing a “Farewell to he Summer” party and we invited everyone we knew. What happened? Well, if I did count it right there were more than 50 people going and up and downstairs, going in and out of the apartments, making barbecue, loud music, playing rock band, dancing on the balcony, children running and yelling. In the end, the chaos. On that day the police wasn’t called for very close, but the concierge came to warn you like two or three times.
We’ve done a couple of parties since then, nothing as messy as that time and not even the same amount of people; things like barbecues, playing volley in the park, going to the pool, dinners in restaurants and/or in someone’s house. I think the most scary situation for people who see/hear us must be when we’re in a restaurant because we’re hardly quiet or discrete. I’m quite sure we have this from all those Portuguese, Spanish and Italian people who migrated to Brazil. Stuff like laugh out loud, curse each other, put tables together, changing places a hundred times just to talk to someone else. That’s the least we do. And this birthday party wouldn’t be different.
The place chosen was the restaurant Chez Grecco, a Greek restaurant well know for its different daily events. Thursday, for example, is the day “Pay one, get the Second for 1$”. I remember a friend of us went through some interesting episode there once not long ago. There was nothing clear about whether there is some kind of exception or special condition to take profit of this, except maybe the list of dishes that were eligible and the fact that, if you had chosen two dishes with different prices, the most expensive would be charged and the another one would cost 1$. So, those friends of us they went to the restaurant. He and his wife made their order, as did his mother-in-law. As he realized they could order one another dish for 1$, they did that and the waitress made no comment about it. They dinned and when the waitress brought theirs addiction, he noticed they charged 3 main dishes instead of just 2. He called back the waitress and asked whether there weren’t some kind of misunderstanding about it. Naturally, she turned to him and told him that, as they were in 3 people, she supposed someone would have two dishes. She also told them that the promotion is valid only one dish per person. Logically they had a big discussion about it, the waitress got mad and very angry e told him that she had never seen someone say she was wrong and that HE was far from the truth.
Anyway, as I had said, this Chez Grecco has been chosen for the party, the same Chez Grecco where this friend of mine got some problems. This time we were easily with 30+, everybody very discrete as always. I still don’t know how the waitress was able to managed to take everyone’s orders and how we weren’t asked to leave the restaurant after all that noise. We even sang “happy birthday to you” in Portuguese to other people who might be celebrating their own birthdays, just to give you an idea of what had happened. Anyway, besides all the noise, we’re harmless. But I don’t think everyone around us may share my opinion judging by the expression in their faces, specially the old ones…