A very Brazilian birthday!

Normally, I am not a big "birthday celebrater." I have never liked all the attention of people singing to you and what not that comes along with your birthday. But, after this year I just might reconsider. I have met some really awesome people here and they all made my birthday really special. I don't think they will ever know how much I appreciated it.

Occasionally at school I proctor the SAT's to help out my friends in the Counseling Center as well to get a sweet paycheck. But, I had decided to not proctor today because all I wanted to do was sleep in. Somehow, I ended up agreeing to help but asked Kristopher, my coworker in charge of the SAT's, to keep it on the DL cause Im not a huge birthday celebration fan. Anyways, Kristopher is such a pal that not only did he tell anyone that might want to know, but he also decided that all the proctors were going out to celebrate after the test was finished. We went out to Carpe Diem for a late lunch and hung out at the restaurant for close to 2.5 hours. Kathy and Lillian even brought a cake to the restaurant to celebrate. It is pretty common to bring cake to the restaurant where the wait staff will bring it out and sing to you. It normally looks like this:
Normally, the whole section of the restaurant will erupt in applause or singing. So, I was incredibly grateful that my friends whispered the English version of Happy Birthday to save me some embarrassment.

After lunch, I came home and took a nice nap. I had agreed to meet Amy and Leah for supper at a restaurant called Roadhouse at the Brasilia teenage mecca known as Pier 21. It is kind of like Logan's back home but with the Brazilian prices. :) I was rushing to get ready for dinner when at 7:45 I heard a knock at the door. When I opened the door, I saw that several of the newbie girls had come out to celebrate my birthday as well. They even brought molten chocolate cake and ice cream.

At the restaurant, while we were waiting on our food to arrive we had our first enounter with a man we will call Felix, mainly because that was his name. He came over to talk to us because he used to live in the US because he works for the government. He obviously was not very smooth because he told us that he asked the waitress to listen to our converstation to see if we were discussing our husbands. Im not kidding. He asked us if we wanted to chit chat with him and his friend, Emerson. He seemed harmless so we told him that we would finish our dinner and then come over and talk. Well, something must have happened while we were eating because all the sudden, the waitress brought us this:

After we sat down, we quickly realized that Felix had had a little too much to drink. He asked us about ourselves, why we were here, he told his opinion on Obama, his work with the government and then he set his eyes on sweet Amy. All of the sudden he starts telling Amy all about how he could not let her leave with out telling her how he felt. "Your eyes do something to me" he said. "They are like the ocean, Can I have your number?" So, what is the big deal you may ask. Only that he is married! That is right, Amy was hit on by the elusive cheating man. Was he sexy? no. Was he powerful? Probably not. Did he have pictures of his wife and children on his phone that he was showing us. Abso-freakin-lutely. We quickly turned the tables on Felix and informed him that Amy was married as well. He didn't believe it so we quickly upgraded Amy's "man-friend" Darryl, to husband status. We also threw in a child for good measure. Once again since he wasn't buying our story we had to say that they had a 3 and a half year old daughter named Sophie who had red hair and big brown eyes.

As we tried to quickly leave the restaurant, he came after us to give us a hug and kiss, and referred to us as the Anglo-Saxons. I mean he was just too much diplomat for words. Luckily for us, he gave us his card so we can call him and have drinks again.
It was such a fun birthday and I am so glad I got to enjoy it with my new friends! If this is what "25" looks like, it looks like it will be full of laughs!