20

Ladies and Germs, I am going to tell you a story. A story about a young man on his birthday. Now clearly since he is a young man this is not the birthday of a toddler or even a teenager. Nay, this is the birthday on which he becomes a true MAN, his 20th. Apparently a birthday ending in 0 is jubilee, but I don't know all of the details. All I know is that I had a fantastic time.

It began the day before. I decided to buy some ice cream to celebrate. I went to the store and chose chocolate ice cream. It looked a little cheap, I'll admit, but it turned out to be quite delicious. I shared it with a few people here before I went to bed. In the morning I slept in, watched some of the Nativity Story, and then went to find Pastor Eugene. He is one of the few people who speaks English here. He took me to the pool to swim laps and to ski on what I can only lovingly call a bunny hill.

 Here is a picture of the pool. It is only about 25 meters long yet amazingly enough it has no roof. That is right, the pool is warm and it isn't TOO cold to get out for a moment, but many people wear swim caps here if only to keep their heads warm. For those of you who don't know, I LOVE swimming (I know I'm a bit round to like swimming but that's beside the point). I ended up swimming a kilometer before we had to leave.

Here is the skiing area. It is in the middle of the city and uses man made snow to maintain a base layer. It was really fun and I seem to have retained much of my skiing abilities. The run is really short, in other pictures from a slightly different angle (we are at the top) you can see the bottom of the hill, and I stress the HILL. Anyway, super fun.

This is one of the several gifts I received. It is a picture of me on the first day of teaching a particular set of students. The class is filled with five ladies in their mid-twenties to early-thirties and one of them thought she was being subtle by taking my picture, she wasn't. I had forgotten that she'd taken it so it was a great surprise. The girls also wrote a note on the back for me and it was really sweet. Also, forgive the weird look, I was really tired and playing with the picture. This photo happened to be in focus more than most others and the others in focus had weirder faces.

My running joke with some of the people here has been that "I am only a teenager, you can't expect me to be responsible! I'll be serious when I'm twenty." Well, now I AM twenty and I STILL don't want to be serious!