Saturday night Grace and I held a party at our apartment, a combination of our one-year wedding anniversary and a long overdue housewarming party. In total over 60 guests showed up at the party, from all kinds of companies that we worked at or with over the past years in Shanghai (Spill Group, Tudou, SVP, Bertelsmann, Roland Berger) and of course lost of friends and business partners.

We had hired a catering service for finger food (Dragon Party), and they did a great job – good value for money and an excellent service. Among the snacks they prepared in our kitchen were small tuna sandwiches, salmon rolls, tart with duck breast, and even fresh brownies. Check them out if you plan to organize a party in Shanghai (andy@dragon-party.com, mobile: 13917016179).

We had lots of wines and beer, but the main drink during the night turned out to be champagne. The 20 bottles of Moet that we ordered were barely enough! Interesting is that during parties in China the Chinese guests normally are the first to arrive, and also the first to leave. Around 11 the first Chinese guests went home already, when some laowai were still arriving. Maybe we should start our parties a bit earlier next time, 9 PM is more the starting time for a European party than a Chinese one.

It was great to have so many of our friends together here, and also to intoduce many of them to eachother. A bit of networking is always part of parties of course, and I like to bring people together that have businesses with potential synergies. And of course singles looking for partners – there were a lot of them last night. But the main thing is of course relaxing and catching up with old friends, and that’s what we did as well. And when around 2 AM the last guests left we looked back on a fantastic night. A bit too fantastic maybe, because I had a pretty heavy hangover when I got up late this morning…

That did not matter too much though, because when I entered the living room everything had been cleaned up already. It turned out that our ayi had decided to come in around 7:30 AM on her day off to clean the whole house before we would wake up. She won’t read this (she is illiterate) but this was a great surprise!