A Boxed Cake

The box that store bought cakes come in! It says "Cappuccino". It is VERY tasty cake made by the famous Roshen bakery here in Kiev.

Happy Birthday to ME!

The theme this week at English Cafe was health and sickness and it came at just the right time...many of our Cafe friends were sick this week with a virus that seems to be making people sick all over Ukraine.

(Actually, I don't want to write about sickness right now. After all, nobody really wants to talk much about being 'sicker than a dog', or how they are 'sick and tired' or how we are 'feeling under the weather' or how something is just plain 'sick'.)

I want to talk about birthdays.

It wasn't my birthday this week, it was actually the young man's birthday who is holding the cake in the picture. He bought and brought the cake himself. By the unwritten rules of Ukrainian culture, if it is your birthday, you bring the cake. If you want a party, you do the inviting, make the food, decorate the house...Yep, you throw yourself a big birthday bash. Quite the opposite of what American culture tells us to do: if it is your friend's birthday, you make the cake for your friend.

So, knowing that Roma was coming (we didn't know he was bringing a cake) and feeling compelled by my own culture to make a cake, I made one of our special cakes- a box mix straight from America, a treat. My cake was quite plain compared to this beautiful 'tort' that Roma brought. But, with twice the normal amount of cake for a single birthday, every sweet tooth was satisfied as each of us had at least 2 pieces of cake.

It was a sweet Happy Birthday for us all!