Once again it proved useless to make plans in Venezuela. If there is no one else to fuck them up I'm quite capable of ruining them myself. On Friday it was my birthday and I was unable to celebrate it the way I had planned. The day of my birthday my cold got worse, I had a fever, and I decided not to go to work. By the way, it´s suprisingly hard to know how one is feeling in a foriegn country. For example, in Finland I would very easily be able to tell if I am sweating more than usually but here it is bloody hot all the time (especially with no airconditioning) so there is no way of telling whether I´m sweating more than usual or not. But the morning of my birhtday I felt a bit cold and weak and in the night I had started to cough. I remeber saying to my flatmate on the Monday before that I don´t feel too well and that perhaps I should stay at home. She said, if you can talk you can work - tough people, the Venezuelans. So, the morning of my b-day I was talking to myself, trying to check wether I have a voice or not. I had a voice but decided that this voice theory does not really apply to Finnish people and called work and said that I´m staying at home.

"I´m staying at home" was the phrase I kept repeating throughout the day over and over, when people called to congratualte and asked where we´d be having the party later in the evening. Well, what happened was that Kasia showed up at my place 6 p.m. with Chuy, a guy from Aiesec. And then Nancy came with a cake and then Cheché and then some more people and in the end there were enough people there to eat most of the huge cake that Nancy brought. Kasia brought a bottle of wine and we discussed the fact that here people drink wine cold instead of room temperature, cause it is so hot here. Actually it was the perfect way for me to celebrate my b-day. I could not have imagined anything better than to have my Aiesec family around me. Kasia was disappointed cause I didn't cry, like I did during the Aiesec seminar, but I promised to cry at the latest on the day we leave Venezuela.

I have to tell you about one super cute thing that happened to me at work. One student of mine, Ramón (12 years old), came to his class on Monday with a ridiculously big bouquet of flowers and a cake for me. The frosting on the cake was like a Finnish flag, white with a blue cross. Kasia was yelling in the next room "cry baby cry", and Ramón's mother was taking pictures. I loved my work that day.