Today was Allie Ross’s real birthday! I woke up at 8:30 still exhausted from the rave adventure, but in dire need of some breakfast. I went downstairs fully expecting to be the only one awake only to find Margarita sitting there, so I ended up having a much longer breakfast than expected. At about 11:30, Abby and I made our way to the Monument to the Murdered Jews. Now that I’ve made that trip about a million times, we have no trouble getting lost or being confused about which train to take. When we got there I headed down into the museum. Im glad I got to experience it by myself, because its a very powerful space and I got to take it in silence and at my own pace. Its beautiful and sad, and when I got to the black room with the glowing stellae benches where they read the stories of the dead over the loudspeakers I cried and didn’t really stop until well after I’d left the museum. I didn’t expect the Museum-Memorial to really hit me the way it did. When I emerged, i walked through the stellae with a new sort of reverence. It was difficult to get myself to take pictures, but I finally walked it off and got some good shots in. I met back up with Abby and Jer at 1:30, and we took the train back home. On the way we stopped and I got some Haribo gummies to surprise Allie Ross for her birthday. She was super stoked! By this point I was dead tired but pushed through it and went downstairs to the little bar-cafe where we worked on selecting which photographs and things our group wanted to present at the critique. At 6:30 we finally packed it up and Dtops, Tess, Allie Ross, Sadia, and I headed to Amar- the Indian restaurant down the street- for birthday dinner. It was so delicious! We started off with some naan and mango sekt. For dinner I had shrimp in red curry sauce, which I loved. Allie Ross said it was the most delicious birthday dinner she’s ever had. We were supposed to be at the University for our mock-up review at 8, but we ended up being about 30 minutes late. It worked out well though, because the meeting didn’t really start until right when we got there. Catherine decided she wanted our group to make some large prints of our night shots and then have a loop of our two videos running beneath them. After the meeting, Margarita took everyone out of the room very secretly so Courtney and I could set up cake, candles, and Champagne to surprise Allie Ross and Mike. They came back in, were super happy and shocked, and everybody sang Happy Birthday. I made a Lent exception for birthday cake– it was an Austrian poppy seed cake. So incredible. We made it back to the hostel by midnight to work on all our photoshopping and such and didn’t get to bed until around , at which point I basically passed out.