¡Feliz cumpleaños a mí! Fiestas and breaking a bed

So although this year marked the first time in 20 years that I haven't gotten up to see "Happy birthday Emily!" written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, my birthday reminded me of how lucky I am in so many ways.

First, although I am far away from home, I'm very fortunate to have the people I have around me and am incredibly lucky to have the friends and family I have to come home to! My host family takes such good care of me and I really feel loved by them. My friends in the program are incredible people and we all bring something different to the table which is great. And to top it off, everyone who works at Cimas is fantastic and also really takes care of us. I'm just really grateful for all the people I've got in my life, basically. So thank you!

Second, we had a great day and the weather was amazing! Our education professor is the director of Colegio Alemán, basically a K-12 prep school that is absolutely incredible, and we got to visit it yesterday which was super interesting. The sun was shining (what a change, let me tell you) and we really had a great time. Coming back to Quito, we had a fiesta in my Spanish class (complete with birthday hats and cookies) which was pretty fun. I headed home to another fiesta with my host family, some classmates, and a couple of other host moms. It was a fun tea party of sorts! My friends who had come over and I headed out when the tea party wrapped up to go to our friend Kati's apartment to watch the presidential debate and the football match (Ecuador v. Venezuela).

And that's where the day got interesting. There we were, thirteen of us crammed on Kati's

 mom's bed with people sitting on the floor around. The debate was about halfway through and

 out of nowhere we heard a CRACK!!!! and collapsed to the floor. Thank goodness it was Kati's host mom, though. She came in to see what happened and actually seemed excited that she had to get a new bed... oh Ecuadorians.