Fun Birthday

Thank you for all the birthday wishes and for those who were able to celebrate with me.

Here is a brief breakdown of what went down on the day of my birthday.

Some friends surprised me by decorating my bike with a garland of fake flowers, four balloons, and a stuffed bear. It was hard to ride home with the balloons blowing and the flowers falling off; I got a lot of stares.



In the afternoon, some local friends surprised me by arranging some friends to bring me into an "empty" classroom. In this empty classroom I saw a paper house (about 11x5x8) with a cutout pictures of some local friends pasted in the front yard. Under the house is a tablecloth with Christmas lights around it and cut out flowers on top of the tablecloth. I didn't think anything of the arrangement at first, I thought it was just something that was part of the classroom. I remember thinking to myself, "hmmm, that is weird. Oh well, I guess Chinese classrooms are just different." At that time, a group of my local friends, who were hiding in a back room, surprised me. We ended up having cake and snacks.

Later that afternoon, I went to visit a teacher, and she found out it was my birthday. So immediately she grabbed a huge handmade stuffed dog out of her closet (see bike picture for a glimpse of the dog). The button eyes were a little crooked and honestly it looks like a piñata. She told me it was a birthday present. I tried to refuse, well not out of politeness, but more out of fear of what I am going to do with a scary huge dog, but she persisted. The teacher in the next office also gave me a wooden fan.

When I got home, Alvin already chopped and separated all the ingredients for our Thai inspired dinner. All I needed to do was cook it.


Unfortunately, we couldn't find some of the ingredients for the Thai food including lemongrass, Thai basil (or even basil), galangal, fish sauce, kaffir lime leaves. We were able to find coconut milk and Thai chillis, although Alvin kept saying that the coconut milk was too watery and tasted like pool water. We made Tom Kha Ghai, Pad Thai (which tasted like Chinese noodles stir-fried), and mango sticky rice. I thought it was pretty good tasting, but as for it being authentically Thai, it was far from it.

Tom Kha Ghai


Pad Thai


Mango Sticky Rice


All in all it was a wonderful day.