Fancy Smancy Dinner Party – 14 March 2007

A couple of weeks ago Wesley said I had to remind him that we’d been invited to dinner at the US Naval Attaché’s house on Wednesday 14 March. So he’s spent the last week forgetting and I’ve spent it reminding him of this dinner.

I assumed it was someone he knew, who had invited us and maybe another couple or so around for dinner. I emailed him to check if jeans will be ok and he said yes – reinforcing my assumption this was just a standard dinner.

We arrived at the house, rang the bell and then a man in a while uniform opened the door – I looked around and there were maybe a dozen people stood around eating canapés (served by two waiters in starched white suits) and drinking glasses of random alcoholic substances.

My first thought was ‘oh my god – I am so out of my depth’. The hosts Dale – the US Navel Attaché and his wife Maria introduced us to a few people and we started making small talk. Wesley got introduced to some people in another group so wandered over there…I was left talking to some very nice people – one of whom ended up being the Consular General – the third most important person at the US embassy in Egypt – the biggest US embassy in the world. I’m making conversation, being polite and thinking the whole time ‘what the hell am I talking about’ they had all lived in several countries – half of them had kids nearly my age! I’m sure they were thinking why has this little girl been invited to dinner?

They were lovely, but we were talking about places in Africa that I’ve never heard of – so I couldn’t add much in the way of intelligent comments to the conversation. I got lucky a few times when the conversation ranged onto something I knew about – or could at least ask an intelligent question about :)

So while this is happening Wesley is off talking to another group – turns out he’s talking about Skype (that he only really heard of recently from me) – we totally should have switched conversations :)

It was all very fancy – and here’s me in my jeans and t-shirt! Luckily there was another couple of women in jeans and I’d worn my hair out and had boots on – imagine if I’d rocked up in jeans, t-shirt and my hair in a pony and my flat runners on – all class I tell you, I’m all class.

The people were lovely and very friendly. When the food was served we had to walk around a table serving it to ourselves, then we sat in the lounge/family room area eating it. The food was superb – but ought to be when it was cooked by a professional chef. The Naval Attaché is expected to entertain people all the time so he and his wife actually get sent to ‘entertaining school’ – well it’s probably not called that, but when they are suppose to have loads of important people over for dinner they need to be able to do it properly.

We were there for a couple of hours, being waited on hand and food by the two serving men. I couldn’t put my glass down for 2 seconds before it was whisked away and I was asked if I wanted something else.

I’m not used to these classy shindigs… all a bit fancy for a plain little Aussie girl but good fun :)