Birthday!

So, a little bit late, but I'm finally gonna post about my birthday. Right before my birthday all the teachers here flew out to Valencia for a teachers conference. We left Thursday evening and got to our hotel Thursday night. We had to be at the conference early the next day. The conference was good, but I didn't feel it was as good as the one I had went to in Puerto La Cruz this past fall. I went to one workshop on standards based report cards and another on professional learning communities. They gave me some key vocabulary that might be good in future interviews, but I think there were too much to these topics for me to really get much out of them in an hour long session. After the professional part of the day there was a big party. Waiters carried trays of beer and wine and there were raffles, unfortunately we had to make a plane and didn't get to stay for that fun part... We were back in Anaco by 9pm Friday night.

On Saturday a bunch of us (Me, Dereek, Shannon, Jay, Morley, and two of Dereek's friends from work, David and Camilo) decided to go to the islands for my birthday. We rented a small wooden boat to take us out to "la piscina" (a really nice swimming area) then around to the beaches so we could choose which one we liked best. (All for the grand cost of the equivalent of $3 a person). We decided on staying at Punta La Cruz. It was the least crowded and had a bar on the beach. All day we just kind of hung out, ate food, had drinks, and swam. I know... my life is really hard sometimes. We didn't actually "do" much so here are pictures from the day.

Battered Venezuelan flag on our boat

Jay trying to bother Morley

Getting back onto the boat is difficult. Especially when you try to do it that way.

Pretty La Piscina

The ladies. Relaxin' on the boat.

The boys being silly

Work friends!

Punta La Cruz

We were running out of beer so naturally we had competitions for the last few.

First it was a planking contest

Then a pushup contest

Then a sit-up contest

I'm sure everyone around us was super thrilled we were there. lol

Having fun on the boat ride back to shore

Shannon and Jay

Dereek and I

On Sunday (my actual birthday) I had a bunch of grad school homework to do so Dereek was a nice boyfriend and cleaned the house, did laundry, cooked, etc so that I could relax and do my school work and play with puppies. Azabache had puppies and they live right outside by house. Here's a cute video of one of them falling:

So yeah, overall it was a good birthday weekend. School has been pretty good this week, too. Maybe my next post will be of a whole bunch of classroom pictures.