It's a party!!

Well, we had our party for Marc, and we survived. It is not even 8:00 and all the kids are in bed and the house is back in order and spotless! Quite the experience again it was. My helpers came in at 11:00 am and began preparing the food. I was expecting about 30 guests to come so we needed a fair bit of food. We made fries (store bought) and chicken strips (homemade) for the kids. For the grown ups we made chicken legs (like shake’n bake, only deep fried of course) the sundanese dish made with beef called rundang, and chop chai (stir fried vegetables). We also had kroepoek (a must here), lumpias and a fruit salad made Canadian style (by me-the only thing I made). Here normally fruit salad is actually spicy. The ladies ate tons and tons of it because it was so tasty. My secret, canned peaches from Del Monte… Shhhh…
So the idea was that we would start at 5:00. Somehow the other pembantu’s were told that it started at 4:00- so we had guests long before we were ready. But Indonesian kids are incredibly patient; they just quietly sat and waited while our kids got a bit wild with boredom. The funny thing was that in the empty house next door to us there was a circumcision party today. Here boys are circumcised when they are a bit older and can understand why. And then they have a big party right after-the boy gets no time to recuperate first. Anyways, that was going on next door. Which was a bit of a worry. You see, here people are really good at crashing parties, especially ones with lots of free food. Anyways, we opened the party with prayer (already there were a few boys hanging around the front door) and then we sang a whole bunch of songs and then the kids went to eat. That’s when some of those from outside wormed their way in and once in how do you say no? Well, we kind of ran out of fries pretty quickly, but here that doesn’t matter because kids are just used to eating rice. Then the adults went to get their food, again some people we didn’t know were helping themselves. No big deal, we had a ton of food for everyone. It was just funny because they basically took the food and ran. Then we handed out cupcakes and after that goodie bags to the invited kids. So it went pretty well. It was incredibly crowded in our house, but everyone had a good time and the food was really, really good. As most of the invitees were pembantus of other MAF’ers, the house was cleaned up in no time at all!
In the meantime, this morning our neighbour finally had her baby. A little girl. If I can I hope to visit her tomorrow as that is a very special thing to do. Of course, here, instead of bringing flowers, bring an envelope with money!

P.S. There's a problem with blogger so I'm unable to post photos at this time...