Birthday & Deathday

As of last Friday I am officially an adult! Thanks to everyone for making my birthday so great. I received many birthday wishes via email and Facebook, but the highlight was talking to my sister, parents and grandparents.
Connie and Doyle Slater kindly let me stay with them on Saturday night at Nanjing University. I spent the day with "my two Carolines," Caroline Pederson and Caroline Yu. We went shopping in the Xinjiekou area of Nanjing. Caroline P. and I went to the city gate and art museum. I especially liked the embroidered cloth, all silky and daintily regal, and I was reminded of a song Meilina sang whose lyrics were the poem by William Butler Yeats:
"Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
The silk was beautiful.
Along with Caroline Pederson, Melissa, Joseph, Isaiah and Kai McMullin, and Chad and little Clara Lee, we went to a hot pot restaurant called "Xiao Fei Yang" or "Little Fat Sheep." It was my first time having hot pot. The waiters put a pot of broth in the middle of the table, turn on the heat, and give you all the raw items you've ordered. Then, you add meat, vegetables, mushrooms, tofu, etc. to the pot at your leisure and fish them out of the pot when they're done and ready to eat! It's quite fun. Melissa even got me a birthday cake and a flame-throwing candle that was supposed to sing happy birthday, but didn't. Still, it was the coolest candle I've ever seen!
My birthday was the day before Qingming Jie, the Tomb-Sweeping Festival. I was in Nanjing on the day of the festival, but today, Monday, was a day off. I went to a local cemetary--"Zhenjiang Martyrs' Cemetery." I'm not really sure for what these individuals were martyred since there were no English subtitles, but the dates on the headstones were from the 1950s. I could really sense the filial piety and patriotism; the cemetery was the cleanest and most well-kept place I have seen in Zhenjiang.