A Laosy Birthday

Well I guess it's time to stop singing Taylor's Swift's Twenty Two because I don't know about you but i'm feeling twenty three... yeah that's definitely not as catchy. Nevertheless twenty-three has been great so far.. I mean its only been 24 hours but hey it's been a great 24 hours!

My day started out as any other ordinary morning; I went to the office and prepared for my class. While trying to pass time until my 10:00 class I worried that none of my students were going to show up. I had been warned that because of Lao New Year next week by Thursday most students would probably be heading home. My worry increased when I saw two of my students leaving campus and another one who told me he thought class was cancelled. I also was concerned that my students who did stay were going to be mad that I made them come to class. So as the clock struck 10:00, I held my breath, and walked to my classroom.

I walked into a dark room and was greeted with a "Good happy morning birthday teacher". My students looked at each other before making a second attempt, "Good morning teacher, happy birthday!". They then began singing the Lao version of the happy birthday song and brought out cake; which we managed to split the cake up into 30 bite size pieces so all the students could have some. However, instead of eating the cake my students fed the cake to me. It went something like this: hold fork up to Teacher Dani's mouth, snap a picture, shove cake in Teacher Dani's mouth, and repeat with next student. Eventually they must have gotten bored because feeding me the cake was no longer enough. Now they were smearing cake on my face and the process started all over again only this time it was: rub cake on Teacher's face, take picture, and repeat. 

After taking all the variations of pictures possible we finished "class" and moved the party over to my house. They decided that they wanted to start throwing water for Pi Mai (Lao New Year) so we filled up buckets and began dousing passersby. It was an absolute blast! I love every time that I get to hang out with my students outside of class, but yesterday is now one of my favorite moments from this year in Laos. 

After wrapping up the party, the rest of the day was spent with the other falangs here in LP, swimming and drinking fruit shakes poolside. #LPluxury

And a couple more snapshots from yesterday! Please note I stole most of these pictures off students's Facbook pages. With the exception of this first screenshot of the Happy Birthday text my year 4 student sent me at 5 AM.