Once upon a time, I decided to be a foreign exchange student, and in due time the Rotary program sent me to Thailand.  I had many strange and wonderful adventures there, but today I’m going to tell you the story of my 18th birthday.

My birthday is February 5th, and that year it fell on a Saturday.  I know it was a Saturday because my friends and I had very specific Saturdays at that time.  Friday night, we would sleep at Lie’s house in Ban Chang, and in the morning we’d go to the marketplace and get gluay taut (fried banana snack) and browse.  When we finished our browsing and our gluay taut, we would walk to the school nearby and try to coax extremely shy Thai children to speak English with us.

The weekend of my birthday, we all slept at Lie’s house in Ban Chang on Friday night, and in the morning went to the market for gluay taut and browsing.  When it was nearly time to go coax the shy Thai children to speak English with us, and none of my friends had said anything, I wasn’t certain if I should feel mad for nobody remembering or sheepish for not mentioning that it was my birthday.  They weren’t sure either when I brought the matter to their attention, but in any case they quickly bought me a Loso tape or a new pair of sandals or some fancy plastic gimcrack and promised to do it up right after our regularly scheduled English lesson.

The lesson went off with the usual degree of success, and when it was over we journeyed back to Laem Thong, a mall near my house, determined to find a nice little birthday cake, complete with candles.

Thailand has a state religion, and that religion is Buddhism.  It also has a fairly brisk tourist trade from Europe and the U.S.  I mention this because the Christmas music and decorations that had appeared mid-October at Laem Thong were still very much in evidence that February afternoon.

Laem Thong is a three-story mall, with a good variety of stuff for sale.  We searched all three stories for anything remotely like a cake, and somehow the best we could come up with was a box of donut holes.  We decided to come back for them once we found some candles.

We once again searched all three stories.  This is a Buddhist country with lots of shrines for offerings, and there is also a strong reverence for one’s ancestors and corresponding shrines for them too, but we couldn’t even find incense, let alone actual candles.  Back at the donut store, we purchased the donut holes, and in a moment of genius my friend Sarah asked the shopkeeper if we could also have a handful of toothpicks—candles in disguise.  

We actually managed to procure a lighter without any difficulty.  Of course, as we went to begin our tiny feast on the steps outside the mall, the lighter had no noticeable affect on the toothpicks.  We scavenged some napkins and haphazardly attached the bits of shredded napkin to the wick end of the toothpicks.  Burning scraps of paper floated away, and the toothpicks weren’t even warm.  In the end, we decided to tear a few more pieces of napkin paper to affix to the toothpicks, and pretended the paper was a flame for the pretend candles on the pretend cake.  We pooled our skill with the language to convince a Thai passerby to photograph us for posterity, then promptly discovered that the donut holes were kind of stale.  

The end.