Happy Birthday to me = peanut butter, Wicked and tea

On Wednesday, December 10, a few of the assistants and I celebrated my 27th birthday. I spent the majority of the day not really doing anything, which was fine. I got a really well-priced haircut and Dawn, Cathy and I got ice cream in the afternoon and then walked around the Christmas markets that I mentioned before for a few hours until dinner where we met up with Junko and Aleksey. Here are some really great photos of the Christmas markets at night.


(This is from behind the entrance. "Bonnes Fêtes" means "Happy Holidays".)

This is one of the fountains downtown with the promenade into the other half of the markets. They said that they were trying to light the promenade as they do in Paris along the Champs Elyysées. Having been in Paris at Christmas before, I must admit that they did a pretty good imitation.

We went to dinner at this Greek restaurant called "La Petite Aphrodite" which means "The little Aphrodite". It got really great reviews and was supposed to be a really cozy family-type restaurant. When we got there, we realized that we were the only people there and they actually had to turn the heat up since we were pretty cold. I think our server was also the cook and the dishwasher. We only heard noise in the back when he went back there so we might have had a jack-of-all-trades there that night. Here I am:
This was our small group (Cathy was taking the picture so she is not in it). Dawn, Junko and Aleksey are on the other side of me (obviously).
Our dinner was fine. I don't think it is worth returning to but the tzaziki sauce was great and clearly handmade. The baklava dessert was tasty as well.

The title of my post is also what I received for my birthday. Since I had become such a tea snob in LA, I passed along that information to my friends here. My mom sent me my special loose leaf tea apparatus brew kettle and now I have great French loose leaf tea to make. I got some great Orient (with flavors of cherry) tea from Cathy and some fruity-type tea from Dawn that was called "Mysterious Mixture". The name of the tea is what actually made Dawn buy it, she said. Why not buy tea with no real name? I thought it was really funny. Junko and Aleksey gave me a funny card that apparently went thru hell to get to me. Dawn, generous great Dawn, also gave me Jiffy extra chunky peanut butter for my birthday. Peanut butter, in France, is both expensive and hard to find so receiving that for my birthday, while it may seem strange, was really cool because I have actually missed peanut butter since being here. You don't really miss stuff until you know you can't have it. Root beer and Mountain Dew do not exist here either. It's a cruel world!

And the best present received, as of yet, was from Dawn as well. She got 2 tickets for both my mom and I to see WICKED (the smash Broadway hit musical, for those of you who don't know) in February in LONDON when my mom comes to visit. Not only do I get to go to London, I get to go to London with my mom (she is flying into London when she comes to visit France...it was so cheap as far as trans-atlantic flights go), and NOW, I get to see my favorite musical in London's west-end which is the equivalent to Broadway. I CANNOT WAIT!

The evening ended with numerous phone calls and IM sessions with friends in the States. I am happy to say that, even though I was all the way over in France, I had a great birthday surrounded by new friends!