Hello! Well, many of you know that I just celebrated my birthday and many of you have already seen my birthday can on my photo page. Turing 29 was pretty painless here, but also pretty uneventful as there really isn't too much to the city.
Matt and I went to the beloved Dico's for my birthday dinner (I have a feeling that many special occasions will be marked there - with french fries)! I had my usual - which the staff now knows very well and we had a good time. We also went to the mall (no dead bodies this time) where I picked up my birthday can of sour cream & onion Pringles and a bonus Dove chocolate bar. We also found a place at the mall that sells DVDs (all of the places around here seem to only sell VCDs), so I picked up a couple of movies too.
The school gave me a nice surprise - our waiban (foreign affairs person) said that she wanted to come over in the afternoon to check our heat to make sure that it was working properly. We said sure, come on over, but were thinking (geez, you need to check our heat? Why?) So, around one o'clock there was a knock on the door and a man came in with a huge cake and flowers from the school! How thoughtful!
I called our waiban to thank her for the gifts and then I was told that she went and cancelled our dinner plans that we had that evening with another teacher so they could take me out to dinner (kinda thoughtful in a kind of inconsiderate way, huh?). So, dinner was at a really good hot pot place. Hot pot - a pot with broth in it on a burner. You add meat, vegetables, noodles to the broth and nosh on the contents for hours (at least in this case).
The dinner was nice, but kinda strange. I didn't really know any of the teachers who were there. They were all from Matt's school. None of the teachers that I work with were invited. So, I only really knew Matt and our waiban (and Mr. Yan - the master negotiator who helped us out with the medical forms). The dinner seemed to just go on and on and on.... After about 1 hour they started to play drinking games, which, isn't really my thing as a non-drinker. This continued to be the main theme for the next 4.5 hours. Yes, four and one - half hours! So, after my long, 5.5 hour dinner we were finally allowed to leave. I was being held captive at my own dinner. I just couldn't leave as I was the guest of honor at a birthday party thrown for me by room full of strangers.
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