My Swiss/Indian birthday in Indonesia! :)

This post is a long time in coming, because I've had no time this week whatsoever to post about my birthday...
I celebrated my Swiss/Indian birthday with Indonesians, Canadians and Americans in Indonesia. And it was wonderful! :)
We had a girls' day out last Saturday, which was 2 days before my actual birthday, but that was fine. We spent all day in Jakarta at 3 different malls. (So typical, I know...!)

Last year was the first time I'd experience the...thrill...of seeing gaudy Christmas decorations here. This is what the fancy malls here in Indo look like at Christmas time. Blech! Too much going on in the decorating department!

We shopped all day/night long and ate lunch at a Swiss restaurant called Marche' in one of the malls. It was, pretty much, one of the most amazing restaurants I've ever been to!

You receive a "passport" from the hostess when you enter the restaurant, and you can get it stamped when you order food at various stations. (Fresh juice station, soup station, crepe station, etc.) You pay at the end of your meal. So cool!

Here are some photos of what it looked like inside. We had to walk upstairs and eat inside a little "chalet", which was cute, but I didn't take a picture of it.

Here we are...

Front row: Shirley Anne, Chrissie, Yoshie, Fera, me, Shannon

Back row: Naomi, Lisa, Elise, Kris

Yoshie is now teaching at a school in Jakarta.

Naomi is Kris' daughter-in-law, kinda, and Shannon is Elise's friend who was visiting for the weekend.

Giving the lovely, green cow a friendly, birthday smooch

I'd read about an Indian Expo at the Jakarta Convention Center, which is huge, so I was excited about going to see this huge, Indian exhibition and handicrafts for my birthday.

However, we arrived toward the end of the Expo, so everything was sadly consolidated to a small room. :( I got some Indian sari skirts out of it, though, which makes me happy, b/c I can't fit into hardly any other clothing here in this country...

I look Indian now--yay! ;)

I'm going to wear this as to school in a few weeks when we have our Christmas day. (I'll wear it as a regular skirt, though, not as a sari...)

For my actual birthday, on Monday, I slept in, Skyped with my parents, and then went to Starbucks and bought myself a Ramayana shadow puppet at the Indonesian handicraft store next to Starbucks. :) Then several of us girls went to Kris' house that night for homemade chocolate cake with THE most amazing chocolate frosting. We played with their new poodle and watched "Hitch".

And since those wonderful days, I've been slaving away at my grading and end-of-the-semester documentation that comes with teaching at an IB school. Thankfully, this December, I'm not coming off of the play, like last year! That was 10 times worse.

Tomorrow, we girls are having yet another girls' day at Kris' house! We're doing activities and Christmas traditions in the afternoon, watching Christmas movies all night (I'm the only one who has any, thanks to my Ebay purchases this past summer), and spending the night, pretending we're teenagers again.

It's 9:45 on a Friday night. The night is young. Time to continue grading!

I'll post again very soon.