By “party”, I mean a physical social gathering of people for the purposes of having fun. It may be used in a sentence as “I am throwing a party!” or “Let’s party!”.
Basically what I am trying to say is the default “party”.
I’ve never been to any, and I have no idea how people spend their time on parties, so I am curious how you did.
I imagine it’s an even looser norm in places outside the west, considering the west tends to view time/punctuality as more “concrete” than some others. For some of my friends born outside the west, if we tell them the actual start time of an event we shouldn’t expect them any sooner than an hour after that lol.