Somewhere back there was my 400th post. Too bad I didn't think to commemorate it...

Today is the day after my birthday, which means I am now 21 and hung out with friends in the kitchen last night. The party was kind of a quasi-surprise, meaning I knew about it but I didn't know who was going to show up or what was going to happen. Two girls, German and Turkish (their names are Clara and Ilif, respectively), made me what I think was a rum cake, and everyone else brought something more or less indicative of their homeland. Not that we had too many international kids - it was 5 Germans, Ilif from Turkey, Irene from Italy, Tihomira from Bulgaria and Nizar from Syria. And Jeff and I. I had forgotten to buy a case of beer like I'd been planning, and stores are closed on Sundays, so I had to offer what I had, which wasn't much. Oh well. It was still a lot of fun! And towards the end, the German conversation was almost completely understandable. I was proud of myself, because they were speaking normal speed (aka fast), and I could keep up. Ilif and Irene were proud of themselves, too, I think - we kept exchanging smiles when we pulled off sentences in German that were almost normal speed and perfect grammar.

I came away from it all with about 40 facebook greetings on my wall and in my message box, a dozen beautiful roses, a yummy Greek dinner, a book on brewing beer and a photo of Tihomira and me overlooking Tuebingen. She wrote what she called a "wish" for me on the back, which I will later have to transcribe onto this website, because it is so cool and so beautiful for someone who doesn't speak English natively (she was the only one at the party who doesn't speak German, so she wrote the wish in English).

Well, it's time for class and then the gym, so I'll leave you all with this little gem:

"Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand." -Mark Abley, journalist (1955- )