23!!

So Monday was my birthday and I have officially reached 23. I had a nice start to the day. It was the first day of a 3 day English Workshop led by a British guy, the American Football coach of the St. Poelten team who is from San Diego and myself. We were each introducing ourselves to the group of 45 students and I mentioned it was my birthday so they all sang Happy Birthday to me. It was fun :) The workshop also went well. There was a kid in my group of 15 that did not have any of his friends with him so I felt kind of bad and tried to talk to him more. The weird part is that he totally reminds me of Darren. He is in the IT (information technology) English class that we are working with so he is a little techie, he has a kind of strange buy confident way of speaking and he kind of looks like Darren too.

After the workshop, the two other English trainers and the English teacher at the school who organized the workshop for us went out to lunch. We ended up talking for around 2 hours about politics, how things are different in England compared to America, etc. It was really fun. It was at a slow time around 3 when we were eating so the waiter even was telling us some stories he knew about Americans. He even tried to tell some jokes in English that were quite funny.

Shortly after Walter got home from work, he found me in the apartment and showed me a picture on his camera. It was a cake with two candles on it, a big "2" and "3" and the candles were lit. I immediately started smiling and ran to the kitchen to find the cake. I almost blew out the candles, but insisted he take a picture of me while I was doing it. The cake tasted great!

Yesterday I had the workshop again and everything went as planned for the most part. The weather was great outside during the day, then of course right when practice starts it gets cloudy and windy :( Everything worked out in the end, but my plan on getting a tan while practicing was squashed almost immediately. After practice, me and all of the girls except 3 who could not stay after enjoyed some cake and drinks at the field. One of my teammates Neeli made a chocolate cake for me and put 23 candles on it. It was fun, the girls sang for me in English and then the German version of the song. After about 30 minutes of chatting some of the girls needed to go home and then there were four left. We grabbed our jackets and headed over to the baseball field. They were finishing up with practice and they would soon join us. We brought the cake too, so that they could have some, which most of them had after a little bit. It was really funny because me and the girls started talking all about One Tree Hill and all the characters and some of the dramatic episodes that have happened over the season. I think the funniest part was that when one of us girls did not remember the name of a character, we asked Andi, one of the baseball players and he immediately knew the answer. That led to lots of laughs from the Pee Wees and Pirates.

On Sunday I will most likely be going with the team to some Under 22 games. We have a lot of players under 22 years old and 4 of them are starters including our two Austrian pitchers. The games are in Linz one hour away and there are four teams competing. One of the teams is a combination of youth players from two or three of the teams from Vienna. It will be good for me to coach and help some of the young players, especially the pitchers. The team captain and I will be the coaches for the team for the day. The manager and head coach cannot go so they asked us.

One more thing that we talked about at practice was the Bachelorette party for our head coach. She is getting married in a little over 3 weeks and the Bachelorette party is set for 3 days before the wedding. They were telling me about the shirts they made for the older girls of the team who will be there. Also about the club we are going to and some of the funny little things that they are making my coach Sabine do. That should be a really funny night. We also made some jokes about how it will be such a funny night that we might not get uninvited to the wedding! But at least we had a great time at the Bachelorette party.