Japanese Food Party

Liz and I started out the day by unpacking most of our stuff, which is my favorite part of moving - finding new homes for everything and organizing my closet and my shoes by color and size...I'm a little OCD about it all. After lunch we got showered and prettied up for our friend Yasu's birthday party, where most of the people we met while we were here in April were gonna be, so we were excited to catch up with everyone again.

We caught the train to Edinburgh and met up with Ashley after about fifteen phone calls back and forth and much confusion about where we were meeting; "mall entrance" apparently wasn't specific enough since there were about four different mall entrances. Anyway we hadn't eaten much at lunch because Yasu ordered us to show up with empty bellies, so the homemade cupcakes that Ashley brought looked yummy and were definitely calling my name. Lucky for her I resisted the urge to steal one while she wasn't looking, and we headed to the nearest pub where I temporarily satiated my hunger with a beer while we waited for everyone else to get to town. After a while Beth and Keith showed up, followed by Ashley's fiance Euan. We had another round and then caught a taxi to Yasu's boyfriend's parent's house (did you get all of that?), where the party was.

As soon as we walked in, I knew that my hunger had not gone unrewarded. There was food everywhere!! Ginormous pots of rice on the stove, huge plates of noodles, bowls full of sauces...oh yeah, this was gonna be good. I grabbed a beer and immediately started taking little bits of food when I thought no one was looking; normally I don't care about things like that, but no one else was eating yet and I didn't want to be the first one to dig in uninvited. This plan didn't work as well as it did in my head, since I was so hungry that I basically ended up standing beside the table with my mouth stuffed too full to even talk to anyone. Eventually when I noticed that this wasn't going down anything like I had planned, I stopped caring that people had seen me eating, so I loaded up a plate and walked around the room socializing in between bites.

Jack (Yasu's boyfriend) was making sushi at the counter, which intrigued me since I had never seen it done before. He assured me that it wasn't difficult, but I assured him that I have a special talent for making things complicated that would be pretty easy for a normal person. I kind of wanted to try it because it looked fun, but more than that I wanted to keep eating, and sushi-making would have involved me washing my hands and NOT eating until I was done. Plus I fully believe that food is always better when you don't have to make it yourself, so I just let him continue making it and settled with watching. Luckily I had already polished off whatever else had been on my plate by the time he finished cutting it up, so I happily agreed to help him eat it (ok, so he didn't ask me to eat it, and he didn't exactly offer it to me, and he wasn't eating any of it himself at that exact moment. But I could tell he was thinking about offering it to me.) I'm not the biggest sushi fan, but this stuff was GOOD. I was definitely impressed with this Japanese Food Party, and it made me wonder, why don't people have food parties more often? We all know the best part of a party is the food, so let's stop the charade of only having parties when it's someone's birthday or whatever, and just call it like it is - an excuse to eat sweet party food! After all, meatballs ARE my favorite food group.

After we were all done stuffing our faces Asian style, Liz and I caught the train back to Stirling and fell into our beds, half drunk and 100% stuffed. That's what I like to call a good night.