Birthdays and Surprises (Gizem)

Sooooo, I love, that is L-O-V-E surprises; both giving and receiving them. And normally I’m pretty good at keeping secrets; but never has it been so much WORK! When you live, work, play, pray, fight, cook, vacation, and eat together with the same people 24/7 it makes it pretty dang hard to not talk about the elephant in the room. In the past 2 months both of my roommates have had birthdays.



Now back home, if you have a birthday and nobody remembers, or it doesn’t go quite so well, it’s easy to bounce back, easy to forgive the one friend that forgot, family that barely remembered; or my personal favorite the person who calls on the day of your birthday, talks to you for half an hour but COMPLETELY forgets it’s your special day! Either way, although they range on the scale from major to minor depending on what birthday it is, and what everyone else in your community did for you, these offenses are easy to overlook. However when you are living abroad, and the same people are your community, family, co-workers, and friends. It puts much more pressure on you to do all their friends and family combined would do back home.

In addition to this, surprises are always more fun; so of course whatever you have planned you’ll want to be a “surprise.” My mental filter was working triple time to try and remember what was a surprise and what wasn’t.



So while I fully enjoyed celebrating and surprising…..er “surprising” my roomies, it sure is easier to speak without having to think…..or maybe that’s something I was supposed to learn in the process…….