1st Birthday (Overseas)

I would have to say that my first Birthday overseas was a good one.  I am now 27 years old, I hope that my life has been fruitful so far, but I hope that it will be even more fruitful in the coming years until the day that I leave this world for another, better one.

We actually celebrated my birthday with friends the night before my birthday.  I unfortunately had to make my own Gluten-Free cake, but I am thankful that I was even able to have cake :)  My favorite thing about birthdays here are the flaming sparklers atop a birthday cake, not simply candles that are easily blown out.

The morning of my birthday, we got on the VIP bus to head to the capital city.  I am not going to lie, Andrew and I were both a little nervous about boarding this bus and traveling with all that has been going on in World news lately, but there were absolutely no problems on either leg of our trip and we felt completely safe the entire time.

When we arrived in the capital and checked into our hotel, we promptly went to Chili's followed by Starbucks and a movie.  It is such a treat to be able to get away to the capital and get some American things.  Not quite the same, but close enough to make us feel at home.

After the movie, we dinned at Fudruckers.  Not quite the burger and fries dinning experience we know in America, but a fine dinning, sit at a table and be waited on dinning experience.

At Fundruckers we enjoyed milkshakes:

 Andrew enjoyed a southwest burger and fries:

Notice his bacon is not really bacon but more like bologna

 And I enjoyed a delicious steak and potatoes:

 The next morning we ate breakfast at a nice little bakery that sells Gluten-Free bread on Sundays.  Unfortunately we were not there on a Sunday, so they had nothing Gluten-Free for me, but we decided to support them none the less by ordering coffee and omelets.  Yum!

As we were leaving the bakery, we saw this herd of goats crossing the street and heading down the road.  Not particularly an uncommon site, but I still can't get over being in a big city and seeing a guy herding his goats.

After all of our birthday celebrations were done, we headed off to the dentist.  The dentist was a whole new experience overseas.  The dentist had his own office.  He had no assistant (at least not the day we were there) and did all of the work and cleaning by himself.  He seemed to be quite a good dentist though, and had lots of complaints about my previous dental work.  Unfortunately we will be making a few more trips to see him in the coming months when we get the time.

We also had our first language evaluation while we were in the capitol.  We were both nervous about this, but felt in the moment that it was going pretty well.  Unfortunately when we were finished, the proctor did not think that we did as well as we should have done.  We will not get our final results of the evaluation for a few more weeks, but it was a bit discouraging to hear her reaction.  We have had a difficult time finding and keeping language tutors in our time here.  Because of this, we unfortunately have a few gaps in our learning and are a bit behind where we need to be.  But we are encouraged, because maybe we did do alright and she was just over exaggerating, but none the less, we are going to continue to try to learn this very difficult language and keep at it even if it does take us longer than it would others.