Birthday Weekend

The past weekend I celebrated my 26th birthday with many of my Peace Corps friends. I got to celebrate my birthday for three whole days. It was tiring, but well worth it.

On Friday night, some friends came over and we had potato and pumpkin ragout, salad, and frozen rum lemonade. Frozen rum lemonade would turn out to be a theme for the weekend, as we had it on all three days. On Saturday morning, I set out to Lime Cay with a group of about 12 friends. We made it there in the early afternoon, after taking a ferry from Port Royal. The island is very small, and takes about 5 minutes to walk from one end to the other. It is not affected by pollution from Kingston, as there is a strip of land called the Palisadoes that lies in between Kingston and Lime Cay. This means that the water is very clear and there is less debris washed up on the sand. We had a fun time swimming, lounging, and eating some fried fish and festival. I got a really awesome belt from Khaled and Caitlin. It has the really big silver buckle that is popular in Jamaica, but the image on the buckle is a lizard. Kind of reminds me of the famous Jamaican iguana, which is only found in the Hellshire Hills near where we live. Anyway, then we went back to our apartment and had coconut pasta while we watched the KU game. Unfortunately, they lost.

Sunday was spent cooking, eating, and watching the Super Bowl. There was chili, beer bread, twice baked potatoes, seven layer dip, tortillas, tortilla chips, rice krispy treats, chocolate cheesecake, and carrot cake with ice cream (the last being my traditional birthday treat). After all that eating, it was hard to stay awake for the football game. But the team I was nominally rooting for did win. This did not make up for KU losing, but it helped me to move on. All in all, it was a really jam-packed, exciting birthday weekend.

-Shane