At least it slowed down due to my advanced age

I got on the treadmill this morning and it asked me three questions:  how long I wanted to jog for, how fast I wanted to jog and my age.  The first and second questions had easy answers (as short a time as possible and very slowly respectively), but the last question was tricky.  I entered 29, stopped, shed a tear, found the delete key, and officially ended my twenties by entering 30.

The team here was nice enough to buy me not one, but two birthday cakes today.  About 25 people crammed into my office and sang happy birthday.  I made a bit of a mess of the whole thing as in India you apparently kick of the singing of Happy Birthday by blowing out the candles, while I, having celebrated most of my birthdays not in India, was waiting for them to start singing so I could blow out the candles at the end.  Eventually they started singing, but when I didn't blow out the candle fast enough half of the people stopped.  Once I finally figured out what I was supposed to do and blew it out there were about 3 different groups at different points in the song.  I explained afterward how the traditions differ lest they think me a complete moron.

Another tradition I learned about is for each person present to feed the birthday boy a bit of cake and then smear a smaller (hopefully) bit of the cake on the birthday boy's face.  Luckily not everybody participated, but as you can see in the picture below more than a couple of people did.

 

The third and final tradition is for everybody present to kick to birthday boy in the butt.  I'll leave you all to decide for yourselves if this tradition was followed.

I've included a few photos of the last couple of weeks below.

Victoria Memorial

 

Victoria Memorial

New Market

We were out looking for a laundromat so we didn't have to pay $3 per pair of socks at the hotel.

This is a shot of the office party that we had here last Friday.