My 23rd Birthday - Turkmen Style!

In an effort to explain how Turkmen birthdays work and are similar/different to an American birthday I have decided to tell you about my 23rd birthday which I hope will be a blend between traditional Turkmen and American. I’ll write throughout the day and let you know how it is going.
It is 8:36 in the morning, I woke up to a phone call from my family in the states wishing me a Happy Brithday, then went to the tualet and banya (bathroom and shower room to brush my teeth), got a text from another volunteer wishing me a happy birthday and sat down for breakfast. Today it was a hardboiled egg, bread (not hot, but made yesterday so still semi-soft) with fresh butter made this morning, and of course çaý. I am now pulling everything I need together for work and will be departing shortly. On my way I plan to stop at the dukan (store) to see if they have tomatoes. I checked yesterday but was told they would have them today, we’ll see. You will see what the tomatoes are for later in this post.
6:25 pm: Work was nice and relaxing, I finished the lesson plan for my kindergarten trip tomorrow. Then I read a book on travel in Italy to prepare for the cruise my wonderful parents are taking me on in May.
At 11:45 someone came to pick me up for the lunch toý that my counterpart threw for me. It was an overall exciting toý on that lasted for 3 full hours and included at least 4 shots of vodka on my part and a lot of meaty meals. There were seven additional people there; 4 doctors, 2 nurses, and one of the women who cleans the clinic. I think we all enjoyed ourselves.
Immediately upon arriving back home I began to prepare my special birthday meal. Lasagna. I began by making the noodles (I’ve only done this once before and didn’t have a recipe either time). I included an egg, water, a little oil, salt and flour. Then I rolled out very thin dough and cut them into long slices and laid them out to dry. I proceeded to make the sauce (tomato paste, tomato mix my sister-in-law made, onions, garlic and Italian spices). Then I went to the garden to pick some spinach from the garden. As the sauce simmered away I proceeded to make a cake (crazy cake recipe) and as the cake baked I made the icing (powdered sugar, butter, vanilla and some water). When the cake came out of the oven I layered the pasta, sauce, spinach and this cheese I bought in Charjew called toureg – it is similar to ricotta. Then at 6:15, a full 3 hours after I started the lasagna went into the oven. It took me another 15 – 30 minutes to clean everything up and now I am simply waiting for it to be all done and ready to eat. I will pull it out at the same time that my family puts the palow out to eat. We will end the evening with a cake. I’ll let you know how the rest goes later tonight, right now I am going to watch some of The Office.
Dinner and dessert are both over and done with. The lasagna didn’t go over as well as I had hoped. I really enjoyed it but there is a lot leftover. I feel like I’ll be eating lasagna for the next week. The cake I made went over really well. My sister-in-law told me it was a really good cake (Turkmen will generally always say food is good because they don’t want to insult you so really good means she truly enjoyed it). Although, there is a lot of that left over as well. I think they were all worried I might not have enough to eat and because I made it for myself they were worried it would be bad if I didn’t have enough. However, I have ¾ of a very large pan of lasagna leftover and over half a cake. Overall it was a very nice day.