The trip to the car was suitably uneventful. Of my welcoming committee, one was a complete stranger and the other was a familiar face worn by a stranger. Disembodied photographs on facebook combined with voices over the phone were all combined to create the actual person, whose personality suddenly seemed more distant from me a few steps away than when we'd been separated by a phone line and 12 000km of distance.
Off the bat I knew I liked her sister, but the problem was that I couldn't be entirely sure if her sister liked me. The only time I'd encountered this phenomenon is when meeting the direct family of the people I'm dating. With my previous girlfriend it was her father who greeted me with suspicion, with the current girlfriend it was her much older sister. My usual response in such a scenario is to shrug and just move on. But I'm caught in a peculiar catch-22 in these instances, because these are people I need to impress as I'm going to be spending a considerable amount of time around them and might even be dependent on their goodwill. It doesn't matter that I like them and it doesn't matter that I'm likeable. In time they'll appreciate that, but I need to be patient until then. And, in all fairness, they need to try and not strangle me because of my sugary-sweet optimism. The cynic in me wants to throw up when I consider what I believe, sometimes.
Still, we were all making the best of it under the circumstances. I was weary from all that travel, dirty, with bad breath (I don't know, but chances are it was travel breath) and probably irritable from lack of sleep. My partner was unsure of how to behave around me, and doing her best not to be awkward while unable to deny that she was feeling that way.
