Entertaining

I entertained friends at home for the first time last Wednesday. Interestingly, of the five people that came over for dinner, four, if you include me, were from CA. This speaks volumes about how well I am integrating with the local populace. I should make sure I have a dinner for non-american friends at some point soon. But, I need to make enough non-american friends first. The fifth person was another Indian, in case you were wondering.

The plan for dinner sprung up the night before at TTT. At some point in some conversation, cookies came up. I strongly support the discussion of cookies in any context, so I offered Megan and Barbara, the two girls from CA who first mentioned them, that I would be glad to offer them the services of my oven and ply them with dinner in exchange for cookies. Of course, A would join us, since she is Californian too, was hitting it off with Megan and Barbara, and this would give her an excuse to see my apartment and where I lived. Towards the end of the evening, there appeared to be some sort of connection developing between Amit and Megan, so I eventually invited Amit as well. He seemed nice enough, though a bit older than all of us (me included, and I was the daddy till that point).

The next day, I tidied up the apartment, and did some hoovering and mopping (see below for my still-very-deep appreciation for mops). Then, I did some groceries, and went to pick up Megan and Barbara from the U-bahn station. They didn't show, so I did more groceries and waited for the next train. They were not on that train either, so I did even more groceries (at this point, my bags were all filled up). Eventually, the girls turned up. They had gotten lost on the trains, gone the wrong way and gotten stuck in a retired train for 15 mins :) And I thought I was bad with the U-bahn system. In any case, they arrived too late to buy stuff for cookies, since the stores in Garching close by 8pm! Dessert would have to be the fine choice of thirteen 3-day old dates I had in my fridge. However, I had stocked up sufficiently to make my main course: Fusili with chicken, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes in a fine pesto and prosciutto sauce. I cracked open a bottle of Spanish rotwein and got cooking, while the girls told me stories. The pasta came out marvelous and I wrapped up just in time for Amit to start making his Achari chicken, which was also very tasty. A came by around 20:15 and we sat down to comfortable dinner, with techno tunes from the radio and four bottles of rotwein. Despite the cookies, I think we had a really nice time, full of stories from back in CA, Jabooty dub commercials and a couple of Russel Peters comedy runs (!Xobile) from YouTube. Awesome!

The girls managed to catch the very last train back to the City and I retired to half and hour of dishes, a bit of ice-cream (hah, I had my own stash for dessert!) and a good night's sleep.