My 30th Birthday, Take One

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This year I feel like the Queen of England as I'm having two birthdays. My unofficial birthday took place yesterday afternoon (9th July) at a beautiful tea room in Salta city, namely: Sabor a Té (Translation for all you non Spanish speaking types: A taste of tea). The 9th July also happens to be one of the most important public holidays in the Argentinean calendar, Independence Day. For the majority, it's just another excuse to have a day off work so I thought I'd take full advantage of people's availability to get 'the mob' together to celebrate the end of an era. Well... the end of my 20's. Which to me signals the end of an era!

So all the preparations were made with the tea room on Monday and I hurriedly made all of the necessary calls to aforementioned 'mob' that tea would be served from 5pm onwards. I'm very proud to say that in the two and a half years that I've been here in Salta I haven't lost any of my organisational skills. Quite an outstanding achievement by local standards. Perhaps that's what I should be teaching instead of English, organisational workshops. Anyway, I digress......

Sergio and I arrived promptly at 5pm to an empty salon. What a suprise....NOT! The staff had prepared a long table in the nook of the tea room, nicely tucked away. Perhaps they'd heard how much noise the Beni rabble make once they get going and decided for the sake of their other customers they'd stick us as far away from them as possible. I'm sure their intentions were genuine and it was rather nice to have our party set away from the rest.

At around 5:30pm the family started to trickle in in pairs or groups of three, just like the animals flocking to Noah's Ark. Collectively, we decided to wait until 6pm for the rest of the guests to turn up before serving the tea. Well blow me down... just as I'd flagged the waiter down to start serving, the tardy ones rolled in, without a single 'disculpe' (sorry). This is one of the cultural differences I still can't get my head around. It's perfectly acceptable for people to turn up late here in Salta with no need for apology or reason as to their lateness. I digress again.

Tea was eventually served at 6:05pm. There were fourteen of is all sat around the beautifully prepared table. To accompany the tea we all had an individual plate of little biscuits and toasted ham and cheese sandwiches. All of which went down well with the guests. Another round of tea and several conversations later the cake came out. I'd chosen a simple coconut cake with dulce de leche on top(national speciality here, the closest thing I can compare it to is runny toffee). As is tradition, I blew out my candle and sent the cake back to the kitchen to be cut up into fourteen slices.

We eventually left the tea room around 9:30pm but not before having a proper toast with champagne for my birthday. It was a pleasant suprise to have my niece Antonella there as she is studying in Cordoba (a few hundred km's away) and had just returned to Salta that morning to start her winter holidays.

So tomorrow's the BIG event. I have to work as it's the last day of exams before the kids start their holidays. So the plan is to finish work, get home, get changed and have a nice romantic meal out with Sergio. We're booked in to a lovely 4 star lake side hotel with spa for the weekend so that's where my birthday celebrations take two will commence. So until then, enjoy the photos from my unofficial birthday.

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