Tak for Mexico!

Danish tradition is that after any type of social gathering, no matter how big or small, you always call the next day to tell the host "tak for sidst" (thanks for the last). I think last night's gathering calls for a little alteration to "Tak for Mexico"...

Daniel and Slyvie had a dinner party to celebrate successfully moving into their fantastic apartment...which, as any of us expats can certainly appreciate, was no small feat. Our hosts used to live in Casablanca and treated us all to Moroccan Babouches (aka slippers) to welcome us into their home. Cesar and I lucked out with the "hotel editions" sporting Marriott and Continental sets:

Sylvie (with maybe a little help from Daniel) cooked a delicious 4 course meal that we enjoyed in typical European fashion...over several hours complete with fabulous conversation.

Earlier in the week Virginie, Daniel and I had been talking about games over lunch and as anyone who knows me an imagine, I became pretty passionate about telling them about how fantastic Mexican Train is. So, to prove to them that I'm not completely crazy I brought it over. I should have known better than to kick off a game at 1:30am...but I had lost track of time and also figured that we'd just play a few rounds not an entire game. But, then 5am rolled around and we were just finishing the game (yep, that's right...Christy Parker stayed out past 5am, I've got 5 witnesses to prove it!).

It couldn't have been much more of an international mix: Two regions in France (Brittany & Burgundy), Spain, Japan, and Romania. As you can probably predict I am thrilled to have brought Mexican Train to the world :)

At the beginning Cesar and Virginie didn't really trust each other...but as the rest of us can attest to it was practically a team effort in the later rounds.

Notice the empty coffee pot on the table...I'm not sure we could have kept going without the caffeine, though Daniel assured us it was very mild.
The final standings* were:

1. Wataru - 260 (we're all convinced he was counting dots)

2. Sylvie - 281

3. Christy - 321

4. Cesar - 379
5. Virgine - 393

and...our big loser....showing us his all too typical stack of remaining dominos...Daniel with 462.

*note: we did not play the round of double twos, which Daniel claims is an automatic disqualification of all above results.