My 21st Birthday

In all my 21 years, I have never not spent my birthday at home. Obviously all through grade school, I was always living at home full time with my family. But even after I left for college, since my birthday is during the first week of March, it has fallen on Spring Break every year, which allowed me to still be at home to celebrate! But this year was the first year that was different. This year, I am over 5,000 miles away in Santiago, Chile.

I’m truly lucky to have both Kyle and Emily here in Santiago with me. They both worked so hard to make my 21^st birthday as special as they could. It started days in advance, with Kyle taking me out for brunch at the only restaurant in all of Santiago that serves “American Breakfast”. He did some serious research before completely surprising me with Café Melba. The night before my actual birthday, Kyle and I met up with other students from our program who had just arrived back in Santiago after a few weeks of traveling. We met at a bar near my house and as soon as the clock struck midnight, the whole group embarrassed me by loudly singing happy birthday. To help me get over this embarrassment, the waiter gave me a free pisco sour.

The morning of my birthday we had orientation at school but it was only for a couple hours and Kyle made up for it by giving me his gifts and taking me to Emily’s apartment where Emily hosted a dinner for me and gave me her gifts (all Chile related!). She made me pancakes (my absolute favorite) and Kyle popped open some champagne – another one of my favorites. An odd combination for some people, but I thought it was perfect. Later that night, a group of us all went to a hotel in downtown Santiago called Hotel Plaza del Bosque where they have a rooftop bar on the 17^th floor. We went up for drinks and to watch the sunset before making our way back to Emily’s apartment to meet up with some of her other friends and continuing the celebration.

View from the 17th floor 

My birthday sunset -  no filters!

            
Before arriving in Chile, I read a travel blog called Best Travel Writing. I read 10 stories from that particular blog as an assignment for my Travel Reporting class but one that stuck out in particular was a story about a woman who remembers having her 6th birthday in India. The name of the story was "A Shared Indian Cake is Never Forgotten". It really hit home for me because I knew that in a matter of weeks, I would be experiencing the same thing that she was. She was much younger than I am now and was traveling with her family, but the fact that decades later she was able to remember each and every little detail warmed my heart and made me excited because I knew how rare it is to have an opportunity to experience something like that.

Looking back on my special day and acknowledging how strange as it felt to not be home, I will say it was an amazing experience. 21^st birthdays are usually always momentous and memorable but being able to have this experience in a whole new country felt so special. And it felt fantastic to have my birthday during summer for once! I was born in a huge snowstorm and generally temperatures on my birthday range from 30-45 F. This year however, it was 82 degrees and sunny all day long! I really want to thank Kyle and Emily for everything that they did – they both went above and beyond, working together to make my whole day as fantastic as possible and without them, it wouldn't have been a quarter of the day that it was!