Cognac and Cake

This is a typical night for me. I have some kind of plan, say to finish prepping for my 9am Monday class before 10pm on Sunday night, when there's a knock on the door. It's Fielding, the American Fulbright teaching assistant who's staying in my guesthouse and will be my roommate when we move into our new home.

"So, that guy that always talks to us at breakfast..." she begins, "I can't remember his name...but it's his birthday and he wants us to come have some cognac with him."

I'm in the middle of prepping for class, and it's 8pm on a Sunday night, but of course I can't miss celebrating a birthday with one of the other residents at our guesthouse. Stefan (whose name I conveniently remember right before we head into the dining room) is a Moldovan professor who guest-teaches in the agricultural department. He and I shared several breakfasts together since his English is pretty good and he's very kind. He's lived in Turkey off and on for years, and he misses the wife and family he had to leave behind to take advantage of the financial opportunity teaching in Turkey brought for his family.

Five of us gather around one of the many tables in the dining room: me, Fielding, Stefan, Ramazan the hotel clerk, Umit, a doctor, and one of the security guards who stopped in to visit while roaming the campus grounds. There's a small plate of Turkish peynir (cheese), some cherry tomatoes, and olives and olives to pick at, as well as a towering stack of bread in front of Stefan. Typical Turkish fare.

"Is this your cake?" I ask Stefan as I point to his bread stack. He laughs.

"I'm sorry I didn't plan this better..." he says in his thick, near-Russian accent, "Usually we plan our birthdays..."

"Hey," I say, "You're not allowed to apologize for anything on your birthday."

Stefan smiles and pours us the cognac (I had to switch glasses with him when he poured me too much) and we toast in Turkish: şerefe!

We sip our cognac. Someone brings out a container of chocolate paste that looks like nutella. After Stefan mentions that cognac goes well with chocolate, I go grab the half-bar of dark chocolate I have in my room, then pass it around. Ramazan, the hotel clerk, runs out into the lobby, then comes back with a cake he'd had delivered at the last minute. He goes into the kitchen and lights a candle, and we sing him "Happy Birthday," American style, before we dig into the cake.

As the group of us foreigners and locals sit around and chat about English, about how we celebrate birthdays in our native countries, and about traveling around the region (Stefan acting as the primary translator between us), I remind myself that I'm not just here for teaching and lesson plans. In fact, it's the small, random moments that often enlighten me the most.