fancy dress party!

thursday was our global annual company awards party. every year we have a different theme, and the london office selected "vegas glam" fancy dress. fancy dress actually means something more like "costume" here, so Christine and I were a bit unsure about what to wear. i certainly don't own anything that qualifies as a costume let alone a "fancy dress". luckily, Beth has to attend a lot of work functions that require this type of apparel, so she hooked me up!

the party itself was at the dollar bar, which is a swanky joint in the hip and trendy exmouth market. lovely location as it's right around the corner from our flat.


ready for a night out!


ah ruffles. sometimes i really like being a girl.

we arrived around 4:30 pm, bit late (demanding clients kept us at work), but our colleagues were still munching their way through starters, which included:

goat cheese salad OR
calamari OR
beet salad

there were also bottles of red and white wine being passed around. the very attentive staff never let my glass get below half full...my company is awesome.

for dinner we got to choose between steak or a burger. guess what this american girl chose! :-)


i like my meat medium rare, with a really big knife.


ambiance

following dinner, we watched the corporate video featuring the winners of the global awards. this sounds boring but it really isn't, and in fact it was cool to know that my friends in NYC and cincy were all watching the same thing. one of cincinnati's winning projects showed footage of all my old co-workers and the office, which made me cry. i don't allow myself to dwell on cincinnati - it's like there's a frosted glass wall in my brain - london's on one side, and cincinnati is on the other. blocked, basically, from my main stream of consciousness but never far from my thoughts.

anyway i got over it quickly because i drank the better part of a bottle of wine with dinner! :-) once the video ended, we trooped to the downstairs part of the bar where we had the whole place to ourselves and an open tab. have i mentioned that my company is awesome??? i mingled with lots of my co-workers who are really, really cool. in fact, one of them was dressed as a pimp (vegas glam, remember?) so about 10 of us girls piled into a tiny room that can only be described as a cave to get our picture taken with him. he had a cane. it was fantastic.




hangin' in the cave

around 10 pm, we decided we had probably caused enough trouble, so we cruised out, hit our local kebab shop, and called it a night. we did, after all, have to work the next day.