Birthday!

I celebrated another year of being alive- go me!- on Tuesday. It started out quite early- we had pancakes at ISB which meant a 6AM wake up! It was really fun- they all knew it was my birthday so they sang happy bday and all that good stuff. I was the designated pancake flipper of the day but did not get to eat any cuz we had so many students we ran out of cakes! good problem I guess! Then we went to the office and at lunch Claire, one of the HS students, brought me up a cake she had made! it was delicious! and very thoughtful-it made my day! Then at night a bunch of friends got together for dinner, pot luck, and games. They had asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said- carrot cake with cream cheese icing and to play games- no one ever plays games over here! It was really fun and funny to see peoples personalities come out- especially those who really don't like games-i didn't think those people existed til I moved over here-but they do! Here are a few pictures from the evenings festivities. Here are Janet, Fiona and I. The party was at Fiona's place.

Everyone chatting whilst standing around scrumptious food!

The spread- including carrot cake, pumpkin bread and spinach artichoke dip- my favorites!! thanks all of you wonderful cooks!

Me after I blew out my candle- take note that everyone has those noise makers you usually have at new years- cuz this was my new year!! it got REALLY loud for a few minutes while everyone went crazy with their noise makers.

Halloween is celebrated at weird times and in different ways over here. There are only a few neighborhoods that even do trick or treating. The way it works is if you live in that neighborhood and you would like to hand out candy you sign up ahead of time so they can put your house on a map they give out. Then if you want to participate by actually going and getting candy you are supposed to drop off a bag of candy at a drop off point the day before. Then those people distribute all the candy to the houses that said they would hand it out. All very interesting. So we went tick or treating Thursday in Overijse. We went with Paul and Janet and their kids as well as about 7 High schoolers. Here are 2 VERY small pics that you can click on to make bigger.

then Friday night one of the schools had their Halloween dance and they asked us to chaperon. We made it a girls night and invited some of our friends along- here are Cassandra, me, Fiona, Celine and Liesl. After the dance they all came back to my place and we ordered pizza and watched "When Harry met Sally." Fun girls night.