Birthdays thus far

Recently we celebrated the birthday of one of our own, Holly, in Biên Hoà. We went to a Restaurant called "Bud's" that just opened and we were pretty psyched about the menu.

I'm not kidding, they had Australian beef burgers for less than 60,000vnd (a good deal for a good burger). The others were interested in salads and pizza and pasta. Austalian beef burgers had me drooling the whole way over.

So, we get a table, check out the menus, talk it over, ask the waitress for a few more minutes, finally decide what to order. Jenni orders pizza and the waitress explains that there's not pizza today. Groans around the table. Change of order. Discussion.

The next order isn't available either. Finally the waitress explains that there's no food at all; they're only serving icecream.

Nice. I hadn't eaten in like 7 hours because I was hoping that this expensive lunch would taste better on an empty stomach. We toasted with our ice teas and had some icecream.
She had a lot of Vietnamese friends take her out for icecream again and then come over later to celebrate with cake. Happy 25th Holly!

We celebrated Ashley's birthday in December. But apparently we didn't take any pictures. I stole this from her facebook from another day at her school. Apparently she had no shortage of cakes. I think she had 3. Happy Birthday Ashley!

For Steph's birthday, back in September, everyone met in HCMC and we went to chrch. Afterwards, we went for pizza and beer, then took a taxi to district 1 to go shopping or do anything Steph wanted to do.

It was the first cake that I've bought and had customized here in Vietnam. I was very proud of our selection even though we couldn't tell if they were polar bears next to a river, or snowmen in a tropical setting. Happy Birthday Steph!

For my birthday, we went to Biên Hoà and stayed a couple of nights. At the time, the girls were having some housing issues and were still staying in a hotel. They still had a little kitchen and Steph made French toast and they dragged me, pouting, off skype, to sing to me and make me wear the birthday headband.

Then they took me to karaoke. It was a while ago and I mostly only remember singing country songs with Brittany. We sang about our ex's in Texas and our friends in low places and anything we could find by Garth or George. No pop Vietnamese music, Happy Birthday to me!

Birthdays overseas can be hard, but we do the best we can.