Saturday playdate with new friends

This is the first of several posts about new friends we are making here in Lisbon.  On Saturday, Zeke and Rafi went over to play with David and Estevão, two boys who live around the corner from us.  David and his sister Marianna go to the same school as Zeke and Rafi, and they have been friendly to us in the pick-up room ever since we arrived at the school.  Last week, we learned that David (age 8) loves Legos, and his big brother, who is a young teen, loves Magic the Gathering, and we arranged a playdate.

Our guys have not had a real playdate for about a month, and so they were really excited about this one.  Zeke prepared by going to Dentinho, the toy store at the nearest mall, to buy a Portuguese-language Magic deck.  We also got a brand-new English-language booster pack to bring as a small present for the boys.  We went to their apartment, a very modern, sleek building on Rua Tenente Ferreira Durão.  When we arrived, the cards were a big hit, and they boys started playing immediately.  Carlos, the dad, gave me a jar of jam he made last summer from blackberries picked near his parents' town in the Beiras region up north.  The boys stayed and played for three hours.  Zeke and Estevão communicated mostly in English, and Rafi and David played Legos and Play Station, so they did not need a lot of language skills to have a great time.  When I picked them up, I chatted with Helena, the mom, and she said that the boys did really well and that Zeke and Rafi spoke politely in Portuguese to her.  We both agreed that it was nice for our guys to get together and that we would do it again soon!  Nice folks.