Birthday Festivities

So this year, my birthday fell on a Sunday - always fun having your birthday announced at church! =)  Fortunately,  it being on a Sunday meant I could do a bunch of different things.  After church, I got to have lunch with the teens. They Josu, Dani and Analia actually cooked lunch for all of us. When I asked how I could help, Josu (in the green shirt) said I didn't have to do anything today - awww soooo sweet! 

So here is us just hanging around, waiting for the crew to get back from the grocery store.

Dani and Josu starting to get down to work!

Awwww. LOVE these guys!

Our lunch = chicken stroganoff (basically a creamy chicken and rice meal), bread and 

fresh squeezed orange juice = YUMMY

As my family knows, I LOVE orange juice. I would rather drink a glass of orange juice with a meal or dessert (mmm chocolate cake and OJ mmm) than a glass of milk. I remember my mom feeding us breakfast for dinner and I hated it when she wanted me to drink milk with my pancakes - 

hello, OJ is the only way to go here people!!

So I LOVE that Paraguayans LOVE to have fresh-squeezed juices with their meals...could be OJ, could be grapefruit..whatever they got going on. NOT really a fan of the OJ/carrot combo that everyone likes here though. The taste is ok, but the carrot pieces....just make for a weird juice texture personally.  ALSO, most Paraguayans think it is very weird that we drink glasses of milk with our meals (water too actually).They have seen it in the movies and many people have asked me if that is actually true. Obviously they have milk here, but it is usually heated up and then sugar and coffee are added to it (the reason I also now willing to drink coffee) For meals, they usually just drink juice and soda - see, I am sooooo Paraguayan!! LOL

So, after lunch I of course had the required birthday nap - what birthday is complete without a nap?? 

Then I got to Skype with the parents, which is always fun. The even sang me happy birthday - thanks guys! =)

After that it was off to my friend Eli's house for an evening BBQ with the singles. Her building has a giant roof where you can easily grill out. The weather was perfect, so we all headed upstairs! The pics are a little weird here just due to the smoke from the grill.

Photos of the gang!

A cool cake trick that they do here and why we DON'T do this is beyond me....They first cut a circle in the middle of the cake and then cut slices from that center piece so at the end of the night you are left with the middle of the cake, which usually the birthday person gets to take home if people don't want seconds.

This is the best photo - the photo shows it best, not the diagram. It really is SOOO much easier cutting a cake like this - definitely bringing that back to the states!!  

The cake here is different though and to be honest I am not a huge fan. It is usually always layered with dulce de leche, which I do like, but often the layers of cake to me seem "wet." Not yummy and moist, wet....I don't even know how to describe it or how it gets like that,. Cakes here to me are pretty much 50/50.  But regardless a birthday must be celebrated with cake and so a small piece can always get eaten!

Love my girls!!

It was a bittersweet birthday though since everyone was like "this is your last birthday in Paraguay" - yea, still not handling that thought very well yet. But despite that twinge of sadness, it was a good day spent with all of my many friends, couldn't have asked for a better day here in PY!!