Oct 18th: Birthday party and TROUBLE

I didnt mention it, but earlier this week I had been invited to a birthday party. Not really an exciting birthday party, but a birthday party nonetheless! The reason that I say it isnt particularly exciting is because it is a party for my social sponsor's two year old daughter. I was looking for a reason to not hole up away in my apartment so opted to go.

It was a mighty fine party. Their apartment somehow manages to dwarf my own massive apartment. Which makes sense, they have more people. But still - The state department does not skimp on space for the folks living here! I took an auto to get there since it was raining at the time. Got a little lost somehow but did eventually find the place. There were a lot of people attending, in fact I think it was just the entire visa/consul section who was there now that I am thinking about it. But still, another good chance to meet people and make some connections. Funnily enough this was the first time I met my upstairs neighbor Melissa. She seems nice, but we didnt talk much. I did chat some more with Danny and his wife Chichi, turns out she also studied in Nagasaki! What a fun coincidence. They are a lovely couple, I had a lot of fun chatting with them. In particular I appreciate Danny's sense of humor.

There was one person at the party that I do not appreciate. They will remain unnamed here, but they are one of the two people (now that I think about it) here that I have run into that I dont particularly mesh well with. Dont get me wrong, they arent rude in any sense of anything at all - but I dont really like the cut of their jib and would rather avoid interacting with them where possible. Unfortunately at this party I ended up stuck in an inescapable conversation with them for a good long while.

Overall a fun party though! They served a delicious spread of turkish food that they ordered from a local spot, from what I heard they got a pretty good deal on it too. They insisted on me taking some of the leftovers home with me which was very kind. There was even some excitement as the party was wrapping up because as some people were leaving there was a brief brown out... and they ended up stuck in the elevator! From what I understand our hosts were able to get in touch with local security to get them out, but that soured my interest in taking the box down to the ground floor. So I snuck out the back with Danny and Chichi who were kind enough to offer me a ride home with them. On the way they invited me to the Diwali party that they were hosting on Monday, and I accepted.

When I got home I made a very unpleasant discovery. My fridge did not have power, and seems to have been without power since last night (the hangout with Willy). Very bad and sad! I was able to salvage some of my food, but many items were beyond saving. This made for a very interesting afternoon as I desperately tried to figure out what the problem was. It was apparent pretty quick that the issue was that it's breaker had tripped - the part that took more trial and error was figuring out WHAT had caused the trip. Initially while I was investigating this I just moved the fridge to a new spot and plugged it in somewhere else - which helped save some of my food items luckily.

Even without the fridge plugged in the circuit kept tripping. I didnt figure it out today, but either Sunday or Monday... The issue was my water filter. For whatever reason whichever circuit I put my filter on would almost instantly trip. So that I could relocate my fridge to it's original spot I just unplugged the filter altogether. Not like it was doing me any good plugged in anyways. It took a while to get this resolved because I only discovered the issue on Sunday, and there was a holiday the following day. But I did make a happy discovery! It seems that the filter has enough storage that I can survive off of it for basically a week before I run out of water, which is very good to know! I will add it here, but when the issue was resolved it turns out that the heating element on the filtration unit had broken or something. I thikn that was causing a short in the electronics that was tripping the breaker, or something along those lines.