Selfportraits (Patreon)

I said that after moving to US, I wanted to finally start trying all the things I never had enough time or opportunity for before.

Jewelry-making classes, floristry, new hobbies, different activities - basically, taking advantage of the fact that I found myself in a completely new place where I don't have my usual life yet, and building it from scratch exactly the way I want.

So...

You won't believe it, but I went to play mahjong.)))

Mahjong has never been on my wish list. I didn't even really know how to play it. But my mother-in-law loves mahjong and had been inviting me to come with her for a while. She kept saying she thought I would like it. And.... I love board games, and I also wanted to find more things that could be ours with my mother-in-law - besides her precious son and discussing what we're going to feed him today.))) So eventually, I agreed.

The first important fact - mahjong takes place at a church.

More specifically, in a huge church complex right next to our house. And of course, my Ukrainian brain immediately created a very specific picture of what that was going to look like.))) But an American church, as it turns out, looks completely different from what I'm used to in Ukraine. No domes. No Orthodox priests walking around with incense. Apparently I don't even need to light a candle anywhere. Instead, there's this enormous complex with a coffee shop, music halls, a school, conference rooms and, apparently, mahjong on Monday mornings.)))

And honestly - I expected it to be complete bullshit.

Monday. 9 AM. Church. Mahjong. What kind of crowd was I supposed to imagine? I assumed it would either be very elderly people or stay-at-home moms, because everyone else is, generally speaking, working at 9 AM on a Monday. Although then I realized that stay-at-home moms are already approximately my age group. I'm not a mother, I'm not pregnant, and I'm definitely not on maternity leave yet, but demographically... I'm somewhere around there.))) So at least I wouldn't feel like a child sitting at the adults' table.

And what can I say?

It was fucking awesome.)))

No smell of incense. No feeling that I was in a church at all. Just a huge room full of tables and completely different people who came there to play mahjong. Some were clearly taking this very seriously, some had been playing forever, and some were there for the first time, like me.

And now I genuinely regret not going earlier.

For some reason, I kept postponing it. I thought it would be difficult, that maybe I wouldn't like it, and perhaps I wasn't particularly eager to dive that deeply into my mother-in-law's social life.)))

But after exactly one visit, I can already see my future pretty clearly.

I'm going to become a regular 🤓

Then a professional 😎

Then I'll start traveling to tournaments 🧐

That's it. There's no way back now.)))

So I think Gary can already start looking for a beautiful mahjong set for me for Christmas. Nice tiles, chips, a mahjong mat - the whole serious-adult setup. So I can play at home, invite all my girlfriends over, teach everyone, and then show up on Monday mornings with my own set and pretend I've been doing this for years.)))

So out of all the new hobbies I imagined myself picking up after moving to America, mahjong definitely wasn't on the list.

But apparently, I've already found my first one)))