Einweihungsfeier and Philou 27.04-3.05

Right, I am now going to do something to address the enormous backlog of this weblog. I have an empty flat, an Elgar cello concerto playing in the background and a glass of red wine at my side, perfect writing environment.

Friday was Labour Day, 1^st May and so a public holiday. Lovely. And I made good use of it. Most of last week was spent preparing for the party. Wednesday we finally went shopping for food. We were planning for around 40 guests in our little flat. I’m not sure how many people actually came in the end. A lot.nBy the end of the shopping Philipp (new flatmate) and I were totally drained and fed up. We had gone to Metro (cash and carry) as Philipp has a car and we wanted to buy in bulk, ie 6 crates of Augustiner Helles (he’s a real Muenchner, no Lidl or Aldi crap for him) and food. We bought a lot of food. Thursday I carried on buying food after work, buying the little things we had forgotten, or rather the not so little things. Luckily Alex was there to help me heave it all home as I’m not sure I’d have managed on my own. I’m recounting all this boring stuff to give you an impression of how labour intensive a good party is

We spent all day Friday getting ready. Philipp had organised to borrow trestle tables and benches from a friend so that we had somewhere to sit while eating. I was very impressed as I had assumed people would just stand around eating And we cooked. We made two sorts of pasta salad, a gnocci salad, tomato salad, had crisps (including twiglets, more on that later), dips, cooked brezel, Philipp made Odbatzer (Bavarian cheese dip thing, delicious). We were going to make pizza but never got round to it, although we had the dough all ready. I hope someone at the party took a good photo of all the food because by the time I got round to it I was photographing empty bowls.

Mid-afternoon Alex and I realised we hadn’t actually been outside all day and that it was beautiful weather outside, so we decided to have a stroll in the park. Then, because the meadows looked so inviting we decided to lie down in the flowers. HUGE mistake in so many ways. The flowers in question turned out to be dandelions, which have a tendency to shed pollen over EVERYTHING. So we had nice yellow trousers and shoes, ah well, nature. Then we had to make friends with the swarm of flies around us. Flies are usually ignorable, but not when they draw blood. Alex looked like a vampire had bitten him and the marks still aren’t gone. I thought that I had got off lightly, only to discover the mosquito bites later on… Summer really is here.

People started piling into the flat at around 8 and the buffet was opened. Lots of interesting alcohols were brought (and drunk) and some people brought cake. Etienne and Drudru vied for the title of Lieblingsalex by bringing me cakes, delicious apple ring and chocolate fondant muffins respectively…mmmm…

As Philipp had invited around 25 and I around 20, we decided that name tags were the way to go. Some people got more into the swing of it than others. As we had several Alex’s they decided to helpfully name themselves Alex 1 and 2, then Paul decided not so helpfully to call himself Alex 3. In much the same vein Pierre-O was Pierre-Olivier 5, though I never did meet the other 4…

Much fun was made of my twiglets, which I had brought out because I love them and wanted to see how many got eaten. Most of them did in fact, despite Alex 1 unhelpfully calling them ‘roots’. Then I brought out the vodka jelly. I had brought a packetof jelly from the UK because I remembered a conversation I had had with Philippe in Kolpinghaus when he told me how disturbed he was by the concept of jelly, so I made him some. I felt that as he had flown from Paris for the weekend just to come to my party it was the least I could do, I’m nice like that. There was a distinct cultural divide. The Anglophones and anyone who had spent time in an Anglophone country recognised it and gamely slurped it down. The latins however, (francophone and Italian) were less appreciative, generally looking like they were going to be sick. Alex 3 was so badly affected by it that he apparently had a sort of fit and sneezed it out his nose, making Alex 1 laugh so much that he started crying and fell off his chair. I consider that a success.

I had warned the neighbours earlier on in the day that there were going to be festivities and had planned to move the party on elsewhere around midnight. Midnight came and went and nobody was leaving and no neighbours knocked on the door. So we stayed where we were…until the last stragglers left at around 4.

I didn’t see very much of Saturday. After getting up late it was time to clear up the mess. And then nap time. We were meant to be meeting Philippe, Laurent, Vittoria etc at a Biergarten but just as we were about to leave the heavens opened. So I summoned everyone and when it stopped raining we went to the Englischer Garten to play football. Or rather they played and I attempted to nap, for a while before being rather rudely awakened by a football to the head.

We all ate at mine again as I still had a load of pizza dough to get rid of. We made pizzas, potato wedges and pasta. The making of the pizzas was fun and some very interesting variations on the classic pizza were created.

After much prevarication and indecision we went for cocktails at the Hard Rock Café, not something I’ll be doing again. They didn’t have the cocktail I wanted, they took aaages, the drinks were expensive, there was a Mancunian stag do or something being rowdy in the corner, the drinks weren’t that great and then they practically threw us out the door at 1am.

So we went onto a club whose name I can’t pronounce even when sober, Zrwrk, I think. Or maybe the doorman was really drunk…

Anyway, it made a change, being a mix of salsa, funk, 30s music and reggae. The 2 highlights of the evening were the table football in the corner of the club, worth 8euros alone, and a dancey version of Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt. We were flagging somewhat and dozing off around 3:30 but that piece got us all up on our feet again. The thing was that we couldn’t really leave because Philippe’s flight was at 7 and so he had to get the Sbahn to the airport at 5 anyway so we stayed with him to say goodbye. This meant getting in at 6am, and getting up at 3:30 pm… Didn’t see much of Sunday either, but did go for a nice meal at a Mexican restaurant. Going out as a group like that was great and to be honest, it felt like just another weekend, rather than a special visit. As term had only just started and Alex had only recently come back it just felt like we were all getting together for a standard Saturday night out of drinks and dancing after being apart for a while. Unfortunately, not the case. Ah well, change happens.

Einweihungsfeier!!!

Tomorrow night we are hosting our housewarming party, so far we have 60L of beer and 40+ people coming. I am getting rediculously excited about this. This evening we did a big shop at Metro (cash and carry) with my new flatmate (and his car) but still have quite a lot to buy.

Have consequently had no time to update my blog. However, next week I have no internet in the house so will able to devote some time in the evenings to writing, maybe.