Birthday Celebrations: Picnic, Chocolate Feast and More ...

Yes, I am officially an ‘adult’ now! It's the big X0 ... Actually, it was remarkably fun. These are some pictures from the birthday picnic.Although there have been some tough and painful moments, and not without mistakes, this year especially the last few months have been I real blessing, thank God. Work has been going well, but my colleagues, friends, and my wonderfully joyous students have really enriched my life here in Thailand. And I’m happy to have been able to see my family twice in the past year!

As for the celebrations … there were many, I’ll just mention some highlights. There were of course many individual dinner treats, all involving wonderful food which seems everlasting here. My fabulous friend UJean and I share the same birthday, and our friends took us to one of my favorite outdoorsy spots, the Huey Tong Tao reservoir for some picnicky fun over the weekend for eating, swimming, badminton and all kinds of relaxed fun.

Some people had the famous live 'jumping shrimp' in a spicy paste.

On my actual birthday I invited all the international students in my program over along with a few friends for a dessert feast. Um, I guess I went a little overboard …

In addition to fruits, and starters, we had: fruit cocktail cake (an island recipe from home) with ice-cream, then chocolate cupcakes with some cream cheese frosting, fudge brownies, a chocolate birthday cake, and finally strawberries dipped in dark chocolate. This all came in stages and lasted for many hours. Finally, the remaining few went to meet up with Ujean at a friend's lounge. To our surprise he started playing a happy birthday song, and brought out yet another cake—flowerless chocolate! and served us champagne. Believe it or not we ate that too! I may have had “fat Tuesday” a little early this year. There might be some giving up to do for the Lenten season.

On another subject, I had a little 'incident' in Saigon (more on that later), so there's not a whole lot of pictures. I also plan to blog this weekend about Saigon, as I'm finally not so busy at work, and been given pictures. Thank you for your patience!