PARTAYYYY
One Year Anniversary Party + Housewarming
Valuing community is a major driver for us. We’d moved to St. Louis in 2010 knowing nobody and had built amazing lives for ourselves filled with friends and get-togethers. How to build (another) new community in a place that is literally foreign to us was a real concern. It’s something we haven’t written about as much as we think about, plan our lives around, and talk about it. It’s a primary building block.
We’ve never had an excuse as convenient as “hey, we moved to a new country a year ago and we’ve got an apartment to christen” so it was an easy call to decide to host our second party here.
The first, a drop-in birthday affair for Scott, had been in March. We’ve done those before in the US. Generally we get about 15 people who cycle through over a few hours. This time we were so incredibly happy - 18 people came to the drop-in. Big difference: they all stayed for hours. We never imagined that small apartment could accommodate 18 people. Several crammed into the kitchen for a board game and the rest squeezed themselves into the living room.
It drives home how blessed we are. We’ve talked - especially to new arrivals - about how we’ve gone about creating a community here. We started working on doing so even before we left the US.
We’ve written in passing about how we’ve met people mainly in three different ways:
When downsizing for our move, Scott was wondering how many ties and suits he’d need to bring. So he reached out to John Miller, the amazing leader of the Lisbon Social & Cultural Club Facebook group. John answered him right away.1 Two days after arriving, we went to an outing organized by this group, and were welcomed and made to feel at home. Many of the people we met that day remain good friends.
We were very aware that this is a Catholic country and most church services are, naturally, in Portuguese. A search for English-speaking Portuguese Christian churches led us to Riverside Lisbon - right here in town. Their website is in English. That’s a good start! We had a couple of questions, though, so Amy messaged one of the pastors and yes, the services are in English. Phew!
Now, we gather at 10 for free breakfast where we meet and talk till service begins. Afterwards many of us also grab takeaway meals and have lunch together. We love how welcoming and multi-cultural the church is - there were people from every continent but Antarctica at service yesterday. So many different perspectives!In St. Louis, board gaming was a big part of our lives. Naturally, Scott reached out to a Board Game Meetup group that gathers twice a week to get the scoop on the language. Since there are many expats there, English is how they roll. Phew!
We’ve made so many friends at The Whisk that even though we don’t get there nearly as often anymore, we can still play board games - either at other venues or, beginning next weekend, our apartment. We’d hosted a monthly board game night in St. Louis and aim to re-start that tradition in a couple of weeks.
We also seem to collect friends where we find them. We’ve picked up two realtors and a husband through buying this apartment. From comments on the blog, we’ve found people who are moving to Lisbon and have lunched with them. They seem to always turn into good friends.
So when it came time to plan our combination Anniversary/Housewarming party, we started on the guest list. Pretty soon, we were close to 50 people. Yeah, you read that right. Fifty.
Concern: yes, this apartment is larger than our last one. But at 80 square meters (~800 square feet), we’re not talking “venue”. How on earth were we going to fit that many people in here?
Our solution? Two parties.
We decided to let people choose which date they wanted. In retrospect, it might have been better not to let people see who’s attending which gathering, to encourage cross-friend-group mixing. But we worried that might reduce attendance.
Preparing for the events forced us to get the apartment (mostly) finished. We know this space works really well for the two of us on a daily basis. (We’re typing this on our table, looking out over the city.)
How to make it also work for a larger group was the question. Amy worked for weeks at choosing and placing furniture - flexibility was her mantra. The main room was a perfect party spot - we didn’t need the second bedroom, which was set up with seating for eight. The next step is putting both the table and couch on wheels so future re-arranging will involve much less effort.
We served an all-vegan menu at both parties. We had a vegan couple at the first gathering; why not make the food accessible to as many as possible? Amy got a “food robot”2 and made three different hummusses … hummupie … hummus recipes - a black bean (quite spicy and far and away the biggest winner - especially with guys, it seemed), and a smoky sweet potato (with an insanely silky texture) accompanied the standard variety. And Scott baked a couple of loaves of quick bread - brown sugar & cinnamon being the overall winner.
Now, merely tossing off the menu like that doesn’t do justice to the prep work involved. We’ve only been in the apartment a couple of months and Scott had yet to bake anything on this side of the Atlantic. There was, shall we say, some trial and error involved in the days before the events as both of us worked to acclimate to our kitchen and wrangle new appliances, robots,3 recipes, ingredients, humidity levels, and a lack of serving pieces.
Scott managed to not only sustain a (non-serious) head injury (pictured above) but also to stain the wood floor, the white limestone countertops, and a pristine white tea towel with an exploded banana blueberry loaf.
At the end of the day, we can say we’re blessed. We have such wonderful friends, our apartment worked out great, and the kitchen has been well broken in. Future stains and dents will just be more love!
As we settle into summer, we’re turning our focus towards those goals we mentioned a couple of weeks ago.
Somehow, a year has passed, yet in many ways it feels as though our lives here are just beginning. Thanks for joining us!
That’s all for now.
Love from Lisbon,
Amy & Scott
P.S. Three weeks ago, we opened a reader survey. Sixty eight of you wonderful people have taken time out of your lives to respond. Thank you.
If you have been meaning to get to it or didn’t know it was there, you’ve still got a chance to weigh in by clicking here:
https://forms.gle/Vasx4kQsqmNdoLdi6
We’ll close it down end of this week and take a look at what y’all have to say. And if it’s worth sharing, you’ll be the first to hear about it.
Answer: not many. Scott brought one sport coat and two ties. Hasn’t worn any of ‘em yet.
She likes it more than the beloved Cuisinart she left in St. Louis
Yes. This is a food robot. It’s amazing. And we hope we haven’t irreparably broken it.
Love that you have built a new family for yourselves! It speaks to the amazing people you both are.
Fantastic! We can't wait to get back into the groove of having gatherings at our place (especially now that we have so many chairs :-) ), but it feels a long way off. Glad you have settled in.