Classing it up: Ambassador's Reception

I finally am blogging about this!  It happened, like, two weeks ago, but we kept forgetting to upload pictures of it.

Each year, the US Ambassador hosts a reception at his home for all of the TAISM staff to "kick off" and celebrate the new school year.  The invitation comes to all the teachers at school on formal cardstock using formal language, making it just all feel very formal.  We got babysitting all worked out with another family and their nanny who was already watching their kids, so we were set for an adult evening out!  Aberly got ahold of this invite a few times before I got a picture of it.

The invitation said to dress business casual.  Great, what is that considered here?  A few phone calls to people who have gone in the past and it pretty much means business formal, so dress nicer then you would at school.  Dress, slacks, dress shirt, etc...  Colin was bummed about this because he wears slacks and a dress shirt to work every day, so he was secretly hoping to get away with wearing nice jeans and a dress shirt.  No such luck.  I was glad because I had a new, snazzy dress I wanted to wear.

Despite TRYING to be a bit late because we are always super punctual, we ended up being THE FIRST ones there.  We thought we'd succeeded by leaving a little later then intended and getting backed up in traffic, forcing us to take another route I knew that went through town instead of the highway.  I thought there was no way we would be on time, let alone in the first wave of people.  I guess punctuality is our curse.  Well, the parking was tight so being on time did allow us front row and no walking through a neighborhood.  At the gate, our names were found on the list and we were let through to a house much, much, much nicer than our own.  Let's just say Colin was considering figuring out how to work for the Embassy.  The Ambassador is the man on the right side of the first picture.  The 2nd picture shows their "entry hallway and foyer".

The evening was very nice and wait staff worked their way around the room with finger foods and drinks.  Free food and free wine.  I was in heaven.  I am a sucker for free.  So we felt super classy chatting it up with our fellow employees and embassy staff as we all stood around in our classy clothes, in a classy house, with classy food/drink.  Oh, and to add to the class, their house was being used as an art gallery per se, to display local art on sale.  We were all encouraged to look around and take a gallery magazine.  I'm not sure what they think we all make; remember we may be international teachers, but we are still TEACHERS.  I'm guessing most of the art would cost a few months' salary.

We did meet the Ambassador and his wife once, and got to spend some time talking to the newly appointed "right hand man" (I don't remember his official title).  We talked about the recently released hikers and Oman in general.  He was really nice and let us take a picture with him after the evening was over outside. 

In all, the evening was really enjoyable.  As I said, it was classy, and it was great getting to spend time with everyone outside of school and getting to know each other better.  It was also great to spend some time just the two of us.