Church Garden Party 2008

On Friday evening the second annual Great British Garden Party was held in Bucharest in the beautiful settings of Aleea Alexandru. After ten days of unbroken sunshine and despite warnings of imminent storms, the sun shone on both the righteous and the unrighteous and a very large number of friends of the Church of the Resurrection attended and helped to raise over 5000 euros to support the mission of the Anglican church in Romania.

Preparations over the previous days had been frenetic and we waited anxiously to see what would go wrong on the day! Fortunately, the only problem was one of interpretation with our very kind sponsors, Metro, who provided all of the food for the evening. Next year we will know to ask for the different ingredients of the salad seperately, rattr than just for "salad" (if you know some Romanian, you may be aware that the Romanian word for lettuce is salat), and that is exactly what we got-20 euros worth of salat, in various forms and varieties-but all lettuce! We survived, and every guest was invited to take home as much lettuce/salat as they could use at the end of the evening!

All of our guests enjoyed a wonderful barbecue grill, washed down with cold draft beer or a variety of Romanian wines. For dessert there was Dutch pancakes and cheese. For entertainment for the children there was face painting and balloons, and our funds were bolstered by an auctions of gifts as well as a mega raffle. By the time the final guests left the sun had well and truly set on a wonderful and successful evening. Thank you to everyone for their support for the eveeng in many different ways, and in particularto our Chaplain, Martin Jacques, for the enormous and largely anonymous work that he put in to ensure that the Party was so well organuised.