Birthday Week!

So apparently I was subconsciously really afraid my birthday was going to be super lame.  Over the course of the semester, I had 3 dreams involving my birthday being pretty pathetic.  Seriously.  The first one happened a good month or so ago, but the last two were both in the past week.  They're actually pretty funny, so I'm going to recount the highlights...

Dream #1 - I spend my birthday eve volunteering at a prison.  Midnight hits and I feel like a huge loser because no one cares.  My friends take me out to a restaurant/bar the next night for my birthday, and we get there to find the place completely empty.  The drinks are expensive (the horror!) and no one is really in a celebrating mood at all.  Two of my friends move from the bar to a table so that they can read the books they brought with them.  The waitress realizes it's my birthday and brings me a free dessert - a twig of crystallized sugar.

Dream #2 - Me and my friends go to some fancy hotel restaurant for my birthday.  As soon as we get there, the waiter finds out it's my birthday and goes to get the celebratory dish: a plate of four hotdog-type sausages.  And I have to eat them right there, before we sit down.  And I have to eat them in under a minute.  I agree to do this for some reason, but I just barely don't make it under the minute mark.  I then proceed to feel sick and want to puke so I can enjoy my actual dinner, but this is impossible.

Dream #3 (which occurred during my nap before my birthday dinner) - I'm napping before my birthday dinner.  My alarm doesn't go off, so I wake up 15 minutes before we have to leave.  I wake up panicked because I still have to shower and get ready.  I leave with two of the guys from Port Lodge that I hardly know at all, and we're walking down a road in some rural area.  We finally stop to wait for a bus, and we're sitting on the edge of the road, which is right next to a creek.  A huge gross fish jumps out of the creek and onto the road next to me.  I think it's trying to get me and have a mild freak out.  It wiggles it's way into the road as a bus comes barreling towards it.  I realize what's about to happen and turn my back.  The bus runs right over the fish, making a loud disgusting squelching sound as fish guts are sprayed everywhere, including all over my back (sidenote: this was undoubtedly the grossest thing that's ever happened to me during a dream).  I try to rinse my back off in the creek.  We go back to Port Lodge to re-shower, but now it's also partly a school building and I'm unable to find the shower.  I end up in the library in my towel.

It doesn't take Freud to figure out the underlying meaning behind these dreams.  I just never realized I was that nervous about my birthday being lame!  Thankfully, my actual birthday bore no resemblance to ANY of those dreams and was really great :)  It was actually stretched out over a whole week since I had finals the day before, the day of, and the day after it (at 9 am nonetheless). 

It started Monday when I heard some mysterious noises outside my door as I was studying.  I opened it to find Andria, Katie, and Sam putting a countdown to my birthday on my door (set to 1 day, haha).

Monday night was spent studying for my Asia Culture exam the next day at 2.  My attention started to wane around 11, when me, Katie, and Jackie investigated a mysterious painted-over door in the downstairs hallway that we had never really noticed.  Port Lodge is pretty old and is rumored to have ghosts, so we got ourselves pretty freaked out about it.  Jackie pushed a knife around under the door (still not really sure what that was supposed to accomplish), and then we heard Christina from the other side of the door.  Turns out the door sits behind the food lockers that we use every day, and Christina was getting food out when she saw the knife poking through below the lockers.  She could even hear us freaking out about what could be inside this supposedly sealed room.  Needless to say, we felt like idiots and I laughed about it harder than I've laughed in a really long time.

At midnight, a bunch of my friends came to my room to sing happy birthday to me :)  Betsy made banana bread, so they stuck some candles in it and used it as cake.  Also, Katie got me a 21st birthday shot glass and I may or may not have been forced to use it to take a celebratory 21st birthday shot...

Once everyone was gone, I went out of my room for a while only to return to find a brand new set of decorations - in red and green, since apparently it's embarrassingly obvious how much I love Christmas (organizing Christmas Day back in September probably didn't help...)  These were also courtesy of Andria and Katie, who were basically responsible for making the whole week awesome for me!

Somehow at the beginning of the semester, Betsy and I decided that McDonalds breakfast is pretty much the best thing ever and that we would treat ourselves to it on the morning of my birthday.  We actually managed to remember this over the course of the past 3 months, so at 8:45 that morning (we had to get up early to keep studying for the final later anyway), me, Betsy and Steph walked over to McDonalds.  We go in and I'm about to turn to look at the menu when I catch a glance of the outside seating area.  It turns out Katie and Andria decided to come early and surprise me (and they dragged Mike along with them), and they had put balloons on the table and a fluffy light-up birthday crown for me :)  So we get breakfast and as we're eating, Andria gets a phone call, leaves, and returns a few minutes later with a gorgeous bouquet of lillies.  Katie (Perth/3W Katie) had ordered them for me and they happened to get delivered during breakfast, so that made the whole surprise thing even better!

The rest of the day was spent studying for and taking my Asia Culture final, and then studying for my Australian History final the next day.

Once my Australian History final was done, I could breathe a (small) sigh of relief, since my next one wasn't until Friday morning.  Wednesday night was my birthday dinner, which was at a Mexican restaurant called Zapatas.  Aaand I'll go ahead and be honest and say that the main reason for this choice was the drink special of $10 carafes on Wednesdays (but for the record, they were delicious!).  It actually ended up being a pretty big group (about 25 people); Katie and Kenzie came from Perth along with a couple other kids that I know from there, plus a lot of people from Port Lodge, plus some other people too.  It was a lot of fun :) 

Later that night we went to The Orient and I got to experience the glory of birthdays...having other people buy drinks for you all night, haha.  I somehow ended up wearing my birthday crown the entire night. 

One of the funniest parts of the night was definitely when Arthur and Aron, two of the guys from Perth, sang happy birthday to me as a karaoke song...and actually watched the monitor for the words.

As far as the rest of the week, it was basically filled with more studying - this time, for my Business in Asia final on Friday morning.  After that final though, I was done until Wednesday, so Friday was extremely relaxing.  Andria and I went to the markets to look for souvenirs and then on a run, and later that night we had our end-of-the semester dinner and presentations for the study abroad program.  It basically consisted of a wrap-up/inside jokes from each of the residences and then a slide show of pictures from the semester.

That night we went out to The Deen and The Paramount, which was really fun. That night basically marked the end of my week-long birthday celebration, and all-in-all it was awesome (minus the whole finals thing).  I think it's safe to say that none of it resembled anything in any of the dreams I had!

So that's pretty much it for now...the rest of the weekend involved wandering around Freo, going to the beach, checking out an Aboriginal festival in the park, and watching a parade for the Fremantle Festival, which is apparently the biggest event in Fremantle.  The parade was a little out there but had a ton of personality, which reminded me of Freo itself.

Now I have 5 days, 1 final, and a lot of packing before we leave Freo for good on Saturday morning.  I'll probably post again before then though.

<3