Birthday

Friday, I turned 31.

I am the fourth oldeset person in my office, including the principal, JW. At least I am not an intern.

I brought brownies to the office. Authentic American imported Betty Crocker box mix brownies. To my credit, I did also throw in a bunch of macadamia nuts and Austrian white chocolate. Yummy. And people liked them. We had a bunch of deadlines in the office so I decided to skip the usual everyone sits down in the conference room and makes small talk event and just set out the brownies in the kitchen, in easy reach of the coffee machine.

The other coworkers did surprise me as I was setting up a meeting room. They filed in and gave me a card and a wrapped traditional book on architecture. They also sang, which was something new since they were prompted by Tania, the Mexican intern who thought it odd we never sang in the office for people's birthdays. Sandro, the intern who was sick for a month, made the card, and everyone signed it. The book was a really nice Phaidon about Alvar Aalto, who is The Beatles of architecture.

Benni and I were the last to leave the office since we had  a late meeting with JW over the latest competition. We headed straight to Mezcal hoch Zwei and were the first there, although Saori showed up right after. We spent about four hours there, drinking great Mezcal palomas and micheladas and shots of Mezcal along with munching on a bunch of red and black mole tostadas. Good times. From my office there was Benni, Xi Wu the new Chinese intern, Tania, and Lukas. Saori also invited her coworkers Martin, his girlfriend, and Nadine, all of them charmingly eccentric. Martin's girlfriend was probably a classmate of Tay's back in Abu Dhabi. Rafa was also there (actually, he moonlights there) and Apo came for a drink as well.

Saori took a half day off and spent it running around the city hunting down the ingredients, (mostly exotic forms of sugar) for my cake, a wonderful sticky toffee pudding. The restaurant dimmed the lights and put on "las mananitas" as she brought out my cake with candles. The video is on facebook. The STP was delicious. I was transported instantly to the old pubs in the Surrey countryside.

After Mezcal, we all trooped over to our neighborhood and had one more round of beers at Akermanns, a traditional but open local bar with a pretty good selection of German beer.

Saori and I were both starting to pass out from the combined impact of a long week, a long day, nearly five alcoholic beverages in as many hours, and being over 30 years old, so we apologized to everyone for leaving early and staggered home to drink equivilant quantities of water to the alcohol we had consumed.