My birthday (1 week late)

In Japan, birthdays are not quite as important as in America. But for my birthday, one of my former supporters (supporters are Japanese Christians embedded in our classes) brought tacos to my house! (not "tako", which is Japanese for octopus). That was nice, and afterwards, I went to a coffee/cake shop with a friend from church, which was also nice. All in all, a nice birthday. Then, a guy from church asked me and Ryan to come to his house on Saturday (3 days later) at 4:00 because we had talked about language exchange.

When we arrived, it was quiet...too quiet. Then, "SURPRISE"! 3 people were there. I didn't know why. For me? Surely not. But I looked, and on the table was a birthday cake with 24 candles and my name written on it! And more people trickled in later, so there were about 10 in all, most from the college/career group. I really WAS surprised. If you are keeping track of names, it was Ai who planned it, knowing about surprise birthday parties because she attended Covenant College in America.

It was a lot of fun, I got to speak in Japanese. Everyone gave gifts, too, with a theme. Each person gave me something in a set of 24 (because I'm 24 now). So Ai gave a nice book with 24 pages, Yumi gave me a bag with 24 candies, Ryan gave me 24 choco moon pies. I thought the funniest one was when Yukino gave a bag with 24 small packs of kleenexes. Companies hand them out for free and use them to advertize. These particular kleenexes came from NOVA, a very popular English school all over Japan. On these kleenexes, she had written "rival". I thought that was funny.

Then, Ikkou, an extremely talented piano player, who can sightread and improvise almost anything, especially jazz, started playing the piano. For my birthday present, he asked me to request a hymn, and of course I chose The Deep Deep Love of Jesus.

Unfortuately, I then had to leave my party and teach English class. On Saturday night? Yes. Oh well, it was a good party, and I was really thankful to everyone. It's hard to explain how surprised I was that so many would come and do that for me without sounding like an outcast. I guess a good way to say it is: I'm a foreigner, so communication and friendships are hard, but they came anyway. So it was good.