Thursday, May 25, 2006

Long birthday

I got a lot of mileage out of my birthday this year. The celebrating started with the earth’s dawn (roughly) of May 24th in New Zealand, and then peaked several hours later here in China. CONUS, as I have grown fond of calling it, took the baton when China was too tired to continue. And at last, the day came to a close in Albuquerque, then LA, then gone.

I am thinking of my next move in terms of how it can broaden the longitude of my birthday.
And I haven’t even read The World Is Flat yet.

It was a good day. An old student came to class with a small wooden comb wrapped in pink birthday paper subtly enlightening the rest of my students of the occasion. Of course, I wanted to announce it first thing in the morning and was delighted that my former student rescued me from saying, "Hi, its my birthday". I know you are supposed to play it cool on your special day, but secretly I've always want to steal Claire’s approach: “Happy birthday to me” as a substitute for hi, hello, how are you, and even as a phone greeting for the full 24 (+ 17) hours.

The highlight of the day was dinner at Wei Wei’s in the Muslim district. Wednesday has recently become foreigner’s night at Wei Wei’s. We ate the usual boiled peanuts, grilled lamb on bicycle spokes and drank a lot of local beer. A Shandong T.V station came to get some footage to help promote a new website designed to help us wai guo ren meet each other and have a good time in Jinan.
So today, at 5:30pm I watched the Shandong news report and got to watch myself turn red and awkward as a flute player, summonsed by a friend, came over and played a beautiful rendition of Happy Birthday for me. That is a long song.

Really a very happy birthday. Thanks for all the birthday wishes.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey hey. Sounds like you had a grouse night. Glad to hear you had a good one...hope that we can spend your 24th in the same part of the world!

4:28 PM, May 25, 2006  

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