I had a lot of fun over here celebrating my seventeenth birthday over the weekend, but to be honest, I'm kind of glad that it's over (I'll get to why in a second).

Friday night I celebrated my birthday with my friends from school, almost my entire class of thirty something kids came, plus some kids from other classes, and so there must've been about forty people there. It was really fun and it was really social, and I got to talk to a lot of the kids in my class for a while and get to know them better, which is really cool because now this week I've been hanging out with a lot of them, and not just the group of kids I joined originally.

Then Saturday night, most of us in AFS in Madrid took a bus together to a little town about 45 minutes outside of Madrid named Soto del Real because that day was the birthday of a girl in AFS named Pinja from Finland. She had a party at her house, and she had some of her Spanish friends there too. We spent the whole night listening to music, and socializing, and dancing.

One of the best parts of the night was when the Spanish kids taught us the dances to Spanish songs, and we taught them the dances to some American songs, including the YMCA, the Hokie Pokie, the ChaCha Slide, Cotton-Eyed Joe, and we attempted Square Dancing, but it didn't work out too well..

Sunday, we had Marta's sister and her family, and Zeke, another AFSer from Missouri over for lunch, and then I got to Skype with my family, Rita, Uncle Jeff, Aunt Amy, Taylor, Madison, and Cameron, and I opened up the birthday present my family sent to me in front of them. I got a lot of Reese's and Peanut Butter M&Ms, which is good because neither exist here (Nor does Cherry Coke which I'm still trying to find). They also sent me Thanksgiving dinner supplies because I'm going to cook a Thanksgiving dinner for my host family.

Never take American supermarkets for granted, because whenever I want to cook something here, I can never find the supplies. A couple weeks ago, I wanted to make burritos, but we couldn't find refried beans. A few days after that we ended up going to a Mexican restaurant, and they had no idea what refried beans are. Hmmm...

Finally on Monday, (November 1st is a national holiday here so I was lucky to not have school on my birthday) I woke up and carved a pumpkin with Mateo. It was a day late, but who cares. Mateo really liked it, it was the first pumpkin he'd ever carved in his life! (Halloween barely exists here).  Then Marta, Mateo, Sara, Jorge, and I went to a Japanese restaurant for my birthday lunch, that night for dinner, Laura (my host cousin) and Sara came over for dinner, and they put candles in a pan of brownies for me to blow out.


There was a slight problem with that however..


If you look at the bottom of the candles, this is what happens when you put them in right after a cake, brownies or whatever right when it gets out of the oven.

It took us a while to notice that though. They put the candles in, sang me Happy Birthday, cut it up, and then we noticed that it looked like the brownies came with a filling. Though unfortunately not of frosting..

We all just laughed about it though. The wax was easy enough to pick out, and the brownies still tasted really good.

But now here's why I'm kind of glad it's all over. This is the first time since I've been here that I've actually legitimately missed everybody. Yeah I've missed people, but not enough that it was always on my mind or whatever. Thankfully it didn't last very long, just a day or so, but it put things into perspective for me. Apparently it's not quite as easy as it had seemed to just walk away from your nice, secure, normal life and move to a new place to start all over.

Another random thing is that now, in the two days I've been at school this week so far, I've already been asked about 29384398423847 times from random people if I had to repeat a grade. Why? Because here they decide what year you start school by the calender year, not the school year. Here I'm in the class of 1994 because it's the second to last year, just like I would be in the U.S. as a Junior. So now that I'm 17, and everyone else is 15 turning 16, people think I had to repeat a grade, which is not good for my ego. :)

But I guess it's completely normal for kids to repeat grades here. Today I learned that a few of the kids in my class are actually 18, which means they had to repeat two grades. And no one feels ashamed or embarrassed by it either. It's just perfectly normal, which is weird because back home, I would be so embarrased if I had to do Junior year or whatever two or three times over.

Oh and one last note: Is it just me, or does it seem really weird that I just had my last birthday as a kid?
(Sorry if that scares anyone)