Ali's Birthday

My birthday was so wonderful. I think it was one of the best birthdays I ever had. My friends were so secretive all day and I knew they were planning something, but I wasn't sure what. I saw Sam passing a note to Mandy during Turkish class, but apparently there were notes flying all over the room! They made an invitation for me to my suprise birthday party and everyone signed it. Then Mandy, Sam, and I spent the day together, found out some information about an American university in North Cyprus, took a nap at Sam's place, and they told me that the girls were treating me to dinner so I had to choose what I wanted. At first I thought it would be hard to decide because I'm a pretty indecisive person, but after about ten minutes of thinking about it, I decided I wanted pizza. So we got Little Ceasar's pizza and it was really yummy. We sat out on the balcony of the boys' flat and ate our pizza and had a great talk with Ata T. Then we were supposed to have a debriefing session at 7:00, so all the guys were gathering in the flat, and all the girls were already there, but we didn't start anything and the other girls were making real popcorn from scratch in the kitchen, but they wouldn't let me in. After a while they all came in the living room and sang to me and they brought out a huge box of baklava and my own little cake, complete with 5 candles. Liz made me wear her Max hat (Max is the ice cream character logo) as my birthday hat. Everyone sang "Happy Birthday" to me when they brought out my little cake, then Bob sang a Chik-fil-a style birthday song (twice) and Liz captured it on video. Then Matt was also taking pictures and he was going to show Bob and me the picture he took of Bob singing to me, but the picture had disappeared from the camera face and gone back to capture picture mode. So all we saw was Matt's palm. It was pretty funny. We had a good laugh abuot it. I have the greatest friends! Then we did have our debriefing session and spent some sweet time in talking with our father. So all in all, it was a very good "first birthday in Turkey," as Ata T said.