28th Day

Today was Carlijn's 22nd birthday and she was in a very bad mood, but it was very funny because all the attention was on her and every body was extra nice to her so she couldn't stay in that mood for very long! We woke up at about 10am and Melanie et her were both very hungover so it was too much for Carlijn to reed all those emails and sms!

For lunch we went to pizza hut (to have some European food for once!), and it was exactly what we needed. After that I still had to get some things for Carlijn's party so I only had a few hours at home to rest until I had to leave again at 4pm to pick up the birthday cake (not only for her, but also for two other AIESECers, Ai Thao and Noo, who had their birthdays on that week as well). We had told Carlijn that we would have a meeting at 5:30pm where we would discuss a lot of things (and obviously she wasn't looking forward to that!), but the real meeting time was at 5pm so that every thing would be ready for the surprise.

But I had some trouble on the road: First the taxi driver took a looong time to bring me to Ben Thanh Market (maybe he wanted to make more money, they often do that here), and then when I arrived at the bakery the cake wasn't ready, and then we were stuck in the traffic jam on the way to the coffee shop where we were all supposed to gather... But at the end I arrived at 5:15 and there was still plenty of time to prepare every thing, and when Carlijn arrived at 5:30 we were all ready and screamed SURPRISE when she entered the room.

It was a big success, and the two other birthday kids were also very pleased. They all said that they never had such a nice birthday, and Carlijn was very enthusiastic about the cake, she said "I never had such a big and beautiful cake for my birthday!!", so I was very happy that it went so well. Every body also gave a little speech, the atmosphere was very warm and I think we never felt so close to each other as a group. And also, it's always very fun to hang out with the AIESECers when we're not talking about the project, they are really fun people!! We also gave Carlijn a birthday card with some pictures of the team I had taken on the day before and every body had signed it, she was very happy about it too.

After the fake meeting, we all went to a karaoke bar (that's the favourite place most Vietnamese people like to go to when they go out, it's also the case for most Asian people in fact, I noticed that when I was in China last year). We had a room only for us and we sang a lot of songs as you could imagine, most of them in Vietnamese (hihi), but I have to say, some of our team members sing really well !! At about 9pm every body went home because we have a workshop tomorrow at 9am (the first one for me, I'm very excited!), and some of us were supposed to go pick up our new intern Yusuke (from Japan) at the airport, but at the end only Dung went, even if I had offered her to join...

On my way back I had to take a motorbike taxi,
and I had some trouble to understand what the man was saying when I was asking him how much money it would cost, and instead of showing me the price with his fingers, he would say a lot of things in vietnamese to me, and looking at me as if it should all make sense to me. So I called Xuan Minh and asked her to translate, but he didn't really want it because he liked the fact that it was all very confuse so that he could make me pay more money. After a while we agreed on 60'000 dong and it was quite all right to me (he asked for a hundred at the beginning), but then during the whole ride he was talking to me and again I couldn't understand a word he was saying, but this time even if I couldn't understand the words, I understood their meaning very clearly! (He was complaining about the fact that I was paying to little money and that he had to drive too far and that I should be glad because the taxis are a lot more expensive etc. and he was going on and on about it). And when he finally dropped me in front of the house he didn't want to accept my 60'000 dong and was pulling a long face, so that was just too much for me. I left the money on the motorbike and just went home. If he didn't want to take me then he simply shouldn't have agreed!! I guess he thought i was just a common tourist, but I'm far from that now!!