As an adult it is a great time to go home and just be with family and get away from real life for a day or two. Living overseas I can't do that so I improvise by having my friends over.
This year I made a list of all of my friends still here in Taiwan and sent out an invite fully expecting half of them to be busy and unable to come. Only 1 person said they couldn't make it. That left me with 20 people that would be coming. Oh dear.
My apartment is a good size. For one person or a couple. It's not really designed to hold 20 plus people. I figured I could always just send people up to the second floor or out to the hallway if it got too tight.
I had a lot of fun looking up recipes and deciding what to make, but then I actually had to make it all. I usually overestimate how much I can handle when it comes to making food for a crowd in a timely manner. Thankfully Dylan offered to come over and help with the food prep. Between the two of us we got everything made and we served up a large amount of food roughly on time.
I expected people to eat a lot more food than they actually did though.
Half of the food. I thought I got a pic of the rest, but I was wrong. 
The festive Thanksgiving turkey came with a santa hat for whatever odd reason. Tania tells me the chef was smiling proudly when she picked it up. It was really handy, my school fed us Thanksgiving lunch on Thanksgiving day. For some reason they gave us two huge bowls of mashed potatoes and gravy. The 13 of us didn't even finish one bowl so I took home the other bowls thinking that 20 people would handily finish off that much mashed taters. Nope. I have a ridiculous amount of mashed potatoes left over. I will be testing out many recipes this week.
The evening did not go off without any drama though. I had planned to have everyone leave their shoes outside the apartment in the hall, because that many shoes inside would be in the way. I even printed up a nice little sign. By the way, leaving shoes outside is a common practice in Taiwan and most Asian countries. Apparently in my building this is unacceptable. I had no idea because I don't normally leave my shoes outside. When I went downstairs to get Tania we rode up in the elevator with some lady that also lives on the same floor and right up the hall from me. As she walked by my apartment she saw the shoes and informed me that this was not allowed. In Chinese, but I got the point. I replied in English that it was only for a few hours and they would all be gone before the night was over. She did not care for this because five minute later the security guy was at my door trying to explain why this was not okay.
He doesn't speak English and I had no idea what he was trying to explain and I was trying to explain that it was only for a few hours and he didn't understand what I was trying to say. Someone who speaks Chinese was called and I was essentially told that the shoes need to be neatly lined up so the hallway looks "special." Ooookay. I had thought about getting a shelf to put the shoes on, but I didn't really want to spend money on something I would use once.
We initially tried a big box that I have, but the box was too big and wouldn't look nice. We finally just lined them up neatly and he left. I realized this was not going to end the problem, because a lot more people were coming and the shoes would not stay in neat lines and that woman was probably going to be checking the hall and reporting me. Marilette came up with the solution of just putting the shoes in the shower. Genius.
Once that got taken care of everybody else started arriving, snacking and mingling and generally having a good time. I loved it.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
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