Happy Birthday to Me!

Staying with a host family has its advantages. (1) High-quality accommodations. (2) Special-guest status and treatment.(3) Fabulous, home-cooked food. On the flip side, the language barrier is anything but slight, and there's really not a cryin' thing to do in a stranger's house when you happen to wake up five hours before the rest of the family. My eyes opened suddenly at 3:22 AM this morning. I was wide awake despite the thick blanket of night which still covered the city. No problem, I thought, I'll just shut my eyes tight and head back to dreamland until the sun comes up. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes later, I was forced to reconsider. Jet lag, I've decided, is an evil, evil thing. A thirteen-hour time zone shift from Eastern Standard Time to whatever it is they call this zone that covers Korea and Japan, is, as I can first-handedly attest, no small thing.
After accepting that sleep was not in the cards for me, I attempted to entertain myself for the next several hours with what little options I had at my disposal. I nosed through another chapter of the book I'd been reading since my arrival. I picked over my duffle bags (which, I have decided, are under no circumstances going to be able to zip shut when it's time to move over to my new apartment on Thursday... how I ever managed to stuff them as full as I did before leaving the US I'll never know... oh wait, that's right, I had expert military assistance with that special operation, thanks Michael!), looking for a hair clip, my lip gloss, a few odds and ends I had been hoping to coming across since arriving, yet hadn't. And then, I literally wore my Palm TX battery down to nothing playing round after round of solitaire. Ugh.
By 9:30, no one in the house was stirring. I know, because I had made the rounds several times, tiptoeing across the wood-paneled floors, peering out the balcony windows at signs of life in the city, helping myself to a glass of water, shrugging at the silence, tiptoeing back to my room again. Wouldn't you know, a short time later, exhaustion hit me, and I melted back into my pillow.
When I awoke, it was time to get showered and cleaned up for my noon staff meeting. It wasn't until I was half-covered with soap lather that it hit me -- today was my birthday. Usually, I rather relish the thought of people making a scene
about my big day. Helium balloons. Phonecalls from far-flung friends. That moment during dinner at your favorite restaurant when the waitstaff serenades you with the birthday song while perfect strangers look on. I couldn't really care about the number of candles on my cake, and I've never understood people that would just assume hide their birthday from the world, kick it under the carpet and hope it goes by unnoticed. But today, as I rinse the suds down the drain, it dawned on me that today would actually be one of those. And I shrugged in acceptance, or defeat, I'm not sure which.
So imagine my surprise when Harrison popped into the staff meeting a little while later with a billowy-white frosted
birthday cake! If this is any indication, my suspicions about Harrison are true -- he is a genuinely kind and considerate being, who does things for other people just because he's a nice guy. Being that he's also my boss, I'm feeling particularly happy about that. So Terry, Christine, Tahira, Maggie, and Harrison sang the birthday song to me, and then we devoured the cake!

The rest of the day was a blur... I managed to shadow Maggie on several of her (soon to be my) classes -- eight students per session, every 40 minutes from 2:30 ~ 8:20 PM. I remember my first day in Taiwan, meeting the children I was about to teach, and wondering how I would ever learn their names -- they all seemed identical, dark hair, dark eyes, same even skin tone. It took me a while to focus in on their individual features to really be able to tell them all apart. It's funny, but looking into the faces of my new students, I didn't feel the same. Despite the sheer number of names to learn (I have about 110 students!), I could already see their personalities and uniqueness. Or maybe I'm just delusional.
I actually managed to leave school a bit early today, went back to my host family's house, filled my tummy with some delicious Korean-style potato curry and rice, and fell asleep by 7:00 PM!! My hard-core party days are apparently over (haha).