I have officially achieved two decades! My birthday, we drove from Ranomafana up into Tana, which should have been terrible since it meant a ten hour ride by Tata. Fortunately, my Madagascar friends are really the best. The night before my birthday, we launched a minor pranking war, involving catapulting of plastic dinosaurs, mysteriously multiplying cucumbers, and somebody, I still don’t know who, switching out all my shoes with Carly’s. Pranking people when everyone’s tents are piled right up against each other is a bit difficult, but we apparently decided to rise to the challenge. The next day everyone had managed to find little gifts for me on the road. I got bars of chocolate and cookie boxes from the gas stations we’d passed, gift wrapped in plastic baggies, a crumbled muffin from a roadside vendor with a lollipop through the top like a ghetto cupcake, and a card that was signed by people while riding the tata, and so was filled with the most wonderful notes from all my friends in the most appalling handwriting you can imagine! Lunch we stopped in a random field and had sandwiches, and we found a chameleon while we were eating. i posed tto kiss it, and the silly thing climbed up on its hindlegs, leapt forward (in slow motion) and latched itself to my nose, causing all my friends to start laughing and screaming. I'll try to talk them into posting some of those! We had a really wonderful car ride, with a lot of loud music and hanging out the window and dancing as best we could in the Tata aisles. I've gotten quite good at the hanging over one seat, hanging from the railing Tata dance. When we finally arrived in Tana, our eyes were popping out of our heads. from a distance, we saw city lights covering most of the hillsides, and a shocked muttering rose up in the tata. we passed a road sign, and everyone gasped. we hit traffic, and a spontaneous cheer rose up. It's so strange to be in Tana now. The streets are like a combination of San francisco and Detroit. there are cars and parking spaces and buildings with more than two stories and actual air pollution. We're all having a little trouble coping right now. Not kidding. Anyway, we arrived at our hotel and had just barely enough time to put our things down before rushing off to our dinner at an authentic indian place that served us saab and mango lassis, more flavor in each bite than we usually got in our meals in a month. Again, culture shock. Then, it was time for the cake. Please try to imagine this scene. The scene is an indian restaurant with all my friends gathered around. the lights dim. My professor waves to the Merina man behind the counter, who turns on an actual tv and pulls up a music video with a title written in Hindi. It starts to play, and it turns out to be a Bollywood clip of indian actors bellydancing around cakes, spliced with random interjections of Sitar and, oddly, a techno version of Old McDonald Had a Farm. Meanwhile, my forty something teacher scoops up the enormous strawberry cake and begins moonwalking across the floor to me, spinning around and dancing back and forth and generally filling us all with terror; after a week of condensed milk, we really wanted that cake! Meanwhile my other teacher, N'aina, scoops up the knife and starts dancing too, so that the two of them ended up parading the cake to me to the techno hindi beat. At some point in here somebody started flickering the lights. then I started dancing too, and it was all just crazy. In short, it was one of the BEST birthdays I've ever had, and so very typically madagascar. Then I got sung to in French, and English, and Malagasy. That last took twice as long as the others combined: arabaina ny tratry ny fitsinerana ny taona nahaterahanao... it was really truly amazing. And now I've officially beaten teen pregnancy! woo!