Party¶
834 words
On Friday our party took place. We had actually planned this one, making sure many people came by sending out invitations well in advance, organising drinks more than half a day before the party started and making an effort to relieve the living room of its furniture as well as decorating everything.
And our plan worked. Many of our local friends came, as well as a couple from further away. Probably I won the (non-existant) competition for guest coming from far away with Jörg coming from Greifswald and Steffen, coming all the way from Aachen – thus having one guest coming from the very east and one from the very west of Germany. Unfortunately Steffen couldn't stay for much longer than the party itself. Our guess is that there were about 80 people around.
We had ordered 30 crates of beer (almost 20 of which were emptied) and asked everybody to bring along some other drink – which many people did. This meant there were plenty of drinks to go around plus there's a lot left for us to cope with for the rest of the year, month. In addition we had prepared sandwiches to distribute once people were drunk and craving for some. And they did. The 100 half bread rolls with cheese or ham vanished almost instantaneously as soon as people discovered they existed. As did the crisps.
Decoration-wise, we bought shiny emergency foils and put them up all around the walls. They gave a really glittery look to the whole flat. In addition we put up lots of fairy lights that reflected nicely in the silverish foil.
For music, Jörg and me had compiled about nine hours worth of an iTunes playlist, going from chill-in music to songs for dancing to some chill-out stuff. This way there was always music playing, with the option of adding in some DJing as appropriate thanks to Wieland who let us use his little mixer for the night.
The music part was really tricky as we all have very different music tastes and so do our friends. Thus we had to accomodate everything from Robbie Williams to The Strokes, from Shakira to Rage Against The Machine, from Nena to Tocotronic, from Kylie Minogue to PJ Harvey, from Tatu to The Prodigy, and so on. Frankly, it was a mess. A couple of things I observed here:
- People are as square as they possibly can: If they don't know it, they won't dance to it. Full stop. No desire whatsoever to learn about new things. (I think I once cleared a dancefloor in England in less than ten seconds by playing a German song.)
- The time for people to realise they don't know a song is really low. That's quite amazing.
- You can also work this the other way round, funnily. If people do know a song, they'll dance to it – even if it's completely unsuitable for dancing: Just consider Girl, you'll be a woman soon – it's by far too slow for dancing, yet people will kill for dancing to it.
- People are also completely unpredictable. I tried to pick up a few clues regarding which trashy pop songs a currently en vogue. I really disliked certain sections of our playlist, being convinced they'd go down well. Yet they didn't.
- Everybody likes The Strokes' Last Nite.
- I've trained my flatmates well enough to like The White Stripes' Hotel Yorba.
- Most of the girls wanted to dance around midnight, yet they didn't dare to start it because there were so many 'strangers'.
- Playing popular electronic songs goes down really well. I don't know too many of them now.
I couldn't resist making good use of our technical gadgetry as well. With my Powerbook playing an iTunes playlist anyway, I also hooked it up to the telly to display the visualiser graphics generated by G-Force. As we had wrapped the telly and the surrounding walls in shiny foil beforehand, that effect was very cool. We also borrowed our hall's video beamer and projected some more G-Force animations generated by Björn's laptop from the sound coming out of the stereo. Very cool as well – although with a slight delay caused by all the machinery involved in between.
People stayed quite late and it had been light well before we went to bed. Us and the flat were in a bad shape on Saturday but we sorted that out by now, with the flat being in a particularly good shape by now. We even used to opportunity to get rid of a particularly yucky bit of carpet...
Oh, and we put up some of the photos that we weren't forced to censor as well.
