18

This week was my birthday! It totally snuck up on me; I still can't really believe I am 19. 

Over the weekend, my host mom made me a delicious (early) birthday dinner of the traditional 寿面 (shou mian) or birthday noodles that are extra long to represent long life. Chinese noodles are basically my favorite thing so that was awesome especially since she paired them with my favorite tofu dishes (stinky tofu and this soy-sauce variety that I'm not exactly sure how to explain since we don't even have this type of tofu / su ji in the States) and a bamboo/egg dish! She also bought me a very fuzzy warm jacket and pants, which I am so delighted about! 

On Monday (my actual birthday), I went out to dinner at Pancake Day with my American girlfriends (Tilden, Maike, Megan, Sara, Carmen) to celebrate by having "breakfast for dinner" (another of my all-time favorite things). There were blueberry deckers, apple-cinnamon capote, banana-walnuts, banana-strawberries, chocolate and milkshakes! Tilden even brought along the local Vermont maple syrup she has from the States. 

My friends went around and told me each a thing they appreciate about me and made me some of the sweetest cards I have ever received. 

Quick shout out to my generous mom for sponsoring this outing!

During night study, my Japanese friends (Reo, Saori, and Yasu) surprised me with handmade paper cranes and Johanna (from Estonia) gave me the the cutest socks in the world (taking the opportunity here to plug a pic of the hand-knitted socks Tilden's grandma made for each of us for the holidays).

After night study, everyone gathered for birthday cheesecake in the courtyard! Yasu gave me the most heart-felt and dramatic rendition of "Happy Birthday" in English that I've ever had the pleasure to hear. That boy is such a diva! I love him so much! No one had a lighter, so I ended up making a wish on imaginary candlelight. I'm not worried though, so many of my wishes are already coming true! 

All in all it was an awesome first birthday abroad. The love I felt from back home was enormously heartwarming and I am so honored to have such lovely friends here as well. 

In our Tuesday music class, we watched a really disturbing but enlightening movie called KeKeXiLi (可可西里）about the devastating poaching of Tibetan antelope and the rangers who tried to end it. It's pretty brutal, so I don't recommend it to the faint-of-heart, but it was also a pretty powerful film about preservation and sacrifice. 

We also let our new year lanterns fly on Tuesday. 

On Wednesday and Thursday we had our final exams, all of which went well! 

Thursday night we went out to celebrate our Germans (Noah and Jens) who were only here for a semester and will be leaving to go home next week! We'll miss 'em so much! 

We went to a really rad cafe/bookstore that sells a huge variety of postcards. You can send yourself postcards years in the future! I wasn't in the writing zone that night, but I'm definitely going to come back before the end of the year. 

On Friday we had a little ceremony where I won two "outstanding student" scholarship awards and where Megan and I won a cash-prize for having the cleanest dorm room on our floor! 

That afternoon we packed up everything for the month-long Spring Festival vacation! 

My last hurdle before I could start relaxing though, was the HSK (Chinese language level test) on Saturday. I rode the metro with my Japanese and Italian friends Saori, Eriko, Rachele, Susanna and Luca to the testing center to take the paper-based level 4 test. 

I'll find out my scores in one month, but I felt really good about it. 

And now I am finally free! Yippee!!!