สุขสันต์วันเกิด !

Yesterday marked my 23rd birthday. Many thanks to my lovely family and friends for their calls, mail, emails, etc. I'm a lucky girl.

My students were as mischievous as usual, though most of my classes did attempt to sing me "happy birthday" (turned out more like "ah-pay bahdt-dai") and a few of the kids gifted me stuffed animal keychains, which they kindly helped me to attach to my cellphone and backpack. If I didn't stand out already as the tall whitey at school, now I'm especially noticeable with my clusters of accessories dangling from me as I walk through the halls. I'm like a mutant 4th grader.

lovely little gift from one of my 9th grade girls.
As I do have a real affinity for pink, sparkly, fluffy things, I wore this around my neck all day

After school, several of the other teachers and I went to the market and, at my request, purchased armloads of fruits, vegetable dishes, curries, rices, desserts, noodles and drinks for dinner. The goal was to try as many new things as possible, with a few of my favorites thrown in. I had great fun roaming the rows of stalls, trying tastes of foods, pretending to understand what people were saying to me and buying bag after bag of mysterious goodies.

rambutan man,
selling his fluffy fruits from the back of a pickup for 10 baht/kilo

everyone carrying home at least 3 pounds of food. each.

jackfruit, mangosteens, rambutans, longans, boxes of unidentified sweets, grilled chicken and fish, corn on the cob, green mangoes, fried chicken skins, bags of curries and soups and noodles and rice and sticky rice and fresh, hot soy milk and dipping sauces

In the end, I'd guess we paid a grand total of between $11-13 for everything - enough food to feed at least 12 people with leftovers.

We came back and ate outside on the community balcony at the apartments where most of the teachers at the school live. We sat for hours with the feast spread out along three tables, random people wandering over to sit down and join in now and then, communicating with me mostly in body language and laughs and broken bits of thai and english. I was almost full by the time I'd taken just one (ok, maybe three or four) bite of each item on the table, but everyone persevered and we nearly got through all the food.

The brave survivors who made it through to the very end of the night were rewarded with bites of the itsy bitsy Winnie the Pooh cake that they surprised me with...

birthday cake sequence

just the way a good birthday should end.

so stuffed you can't speak.