Grocery Lists...

Friday was a great day. I got a lot of things done at the office, was able to leave by 4pm because it was the weekend, and went home to prepare for the biggest dinner party of my life.

Dominic and I had been planning to revive the weekly dinners he hosted at his house before the new year, and I offered to cook because any opportunity to work with food is something that I want to take advantage of. I had decided earlier in the week to make tacos because they are easy to make, are interactive, and can feed a lot of people. When I had talked to Dom earlier in the week, we figured there would be around 10 people coming. However, he sent out the invitation to Partyslava, which is the list-serve we use here to advertise events, concerts, and parties, so the potential for en-mass replies was high.

On Friday when we went to lunch at Bagel & Coffee Story we started to plan logistics for meeting at Tesco and buying supplies. Everything was cool. When I got back to work, he asked me if I wanted the good news of the bad news. I always go for the bad first, so that it is overshadowed by the good later. He told me that 17 people had rsvp'd our invitation. HOLY FRIJOLES. This was going to be interesting. So, I went online and tried to figure out how much meat I would have to buy so that every person could have 2 tacos. The magic number was 4 kilos. I eyeballed the rest of the ingredients. The total for everything was 1700 Sk. So, when split up, that's not bad at all. The best part was that we paid 130Sk for 10 bottles of beer. Classic.

So, we haul everything back to the apartment. It's just Dom and me, so I have all of the bags on my arms and he is carrying the beer. My shoulders are a bit sore today, but it was totally worth it. When we got to the apartment, I immediately began setting everything up and delegating responsibilities to Maxime and Juste. People were going to start showing up at 7:30, and I wanted the food to be on the table shortly after so it was fresh, hot, and ready to be consumed.

I was able to cook all of the meat at a pretty good pace, warm up the tortillas, and have all of the toppings on the table buffet style so that people could just pick them up and wolf 'em down. The help I had from some of the people in food prep was totally great. There was no way I was going to be able to do all that myself. I also introduced people to salsa verde. I was surprised Tesco even had salsa verde. To be completely honest, I was even surprised they had tortillas. This is not the land of plenty.

Everything was a success! We even had 4 extra people show up, and there was enough food for them because I bought some tortilla chips as well so everyone could make taco salad. (I like to plan ahead. It's the control freak in me) Everyone was very complimentary, so that made me happy.

After hanging out there, we moved on to Alligator, and then to Circus Barok, which is a club on a boat that is anchored in the Danube. Definitely a good time, and you can make requests to the DJ. Its a little hot in there because there isn't a good deal of air circulation going on, and the light show started to mess with me after awhile, but it was good to have my friends together just celebrating the weekend. Plus: I didn't have to pay the cover :) Being female has tons of perks.