Sweetheart's Day With Adaptations

It's strange sometimes what you struggle with when you move to a new country and start dealing with a new culture. You struggle with learning a new language, learning new ways of doing things, and feeling like a stranger in a strange land. For me holidays and other special days seemed to be a hard time to figure out. Obviously since we don't live in the States, we don't get national holidays off. Even Christian holidays are different...Christmas and Easter are just regular work times unless Songkran falls at the same time as Easter. Thanksgiving is just another school day. I didn't really imagine that this would be something I would struggle with so I had no plan to deal with it. I just made it through as best as I could until I began to see the good things God was doing through it (and the shock wore off).

Now when we don't get to celebrate on the actual day of something, it's not that big of a deal. We just stretch it out for as long as possible. :) Celebrating for a whole week has actually turned out to be quite fun although it is quite fattening.
For Sweetheart's Day '11, we started off with a pizza and movie night. This is not a picture of the actual pizza from pizza night, but it's one we had tried earlier in the year. This one had shrimp, crab, and mandarin oranges on top.On Saturday evening we had a youth meeting at Antioch church. The teenagers invited their friends for a fun evening of games, singing, and sharing.
The youth picked the songs and led the music.
Two of Hope's ESL students visited for the evening. Gam (the girl) spent the night with Pawn and went to church with us on Sunday also.
Rusty and I shared with the young'uns about our lives before we were married. Wow! That was a long time ago. I love him more each day. He's still the jazz in my life. :)
After we finished the interview, Rusty shared with everyone about what true love is. Apart from God, love is impossible.

After that weekend, we finally finished celebrating on Wednesday or Thursday of that week with a shrimp boil. Yummy!