Planetina

Personally I see life like an adventure, where you have all the copy writes of creating the best possible version of yourself. Coming to this wonderful world as tabula rasa is a scary thing, because it’s like somebody would throw you into the water without any instructions on how to live and not knowing your date of expiry (oh, I’m so glad I don’t know it 😛 ). However the nature equiped us with some fantastic features packed in our brain… its our lymbic system, the hometown of emotions. From an evolutionary perspective their purpose is to guide us, so on one side feeling good means “thumbs up, you’re on the right path and doing a great job, so continue doing it“, and on the other side feeling bad is triggering the alarm button “man, what the hell are you doing?!? You need to change something as soon as possible“. Somethimes it’s hard to understand Emotish and deciding to come to China right before my birthday felt like a crazy idea, that I needed to try out.

Time passes incredible quickly here, so the D-day on my B-day was coming closer and closer. Organizing a party in a foreign country for the people I just meet here seemed like mission impossible, but it turned out to be easy-peasy. First of all I needed a location! This requirement was fulfilled by itself, because I got to know Adam, the owner of Rock Abond, with whom I became a good friend. I asked him, if I could have a party in his bar. Once this was checked off, I started to think, what to serve to my guests? Because it was really cold outside, it’s nicer to drink a hot drink that warms you. In Slovenia we usually drink mulled wine during this part of the year, so the solution to the serving problem was right at hand. The only worrying thing now was getting the right ingredients to make it.

To make a mulled wine you need red or white wine, that is not that expensive, but it shouldn’t be too cheap as well, if you want it to be drinkable. I decided to go for red wine and I was a bit surprised by the price, since it is quite expensive for their standard (50 CNY = around 7 €). Then you need various spices like cinnamon, cloves, ginger (well, these were the ones I could get here) and to sweeten it you add orange, mandarin and sugar. Mix the wine with water in a 3:1 ratio and put it in a pot together with nice smelling spices and bring it to boil, but not for too long, if you don’t want to burn off the alcohol and have a child’s drink.

When I finished making the mulled wine my international guests came to the bar and crowned me “Princess Happy Birthday” 🙂 . Since mulled wine is not common for China, Adam didn’t have proper glasses or cups to serve it, so I needed to be creative with small coffee cups and it looked like we would be having a tea party 🙂 . As a birthday present I received two delicious fruit cakes, which made my evening, because I was really missing cakes already 😛 . Celebrating my birthday in a boulder bar was perfect, because after eating came the part to climb on the wall and to have fun.

This birthday will have a special place in my memory, because I saw that no matter where you are, even far away from your friends and family, you are never alone. Being surrounded by such nice people made me realize how lucky I am to have met them.

The funny thing was, even after midnight in China, I was still receiving messages from friends from other parts of the world that are some hours behind. So I have experienced the longest birthday in my life, which is a bit weird but cool 🙂 .