My Roommate's Birthday

I have written many times about my best friend from Erasmus, Athanasia, who was also my roommate during the second semester. In this entry, I am going to write about how we celebrated her birthday - maybe this will give more ideas for throwing "Erasmus surprises! "

Athanasia's birthday is in April. It was hot by that time (the best weather, in my opinion, is in the springtime) so we had plans to go out at night. I had already given her my present (a small coin purse I had bought in Portugal - I'll talk about that trip in another entry), but I had also planned a surprise for her. I knew that she didn't feel like celebrating with a big party because it was her last month in Valencia and she preferred to take things easy. Because of this, I didn't put together a surprise party, however - I did prepare a surprise video...

Two weeks before Athanasia's birthday, I had sent a ton of messages through Facebook to both our mutual Erasmus friends, and also to her closest friends that had been in Erasmus with her one year prior. I was able to do this through the old Facebook photos they were tagged in, and also with the help of Elena, who was already in Greece; we had been chatting through Facebook to be able to put everything together. What I had asked Athanasia’s friends to do was to write their birthday wishes on a piece of paper and to take a photo of themselves afterwards holding it in their hands. In the end, they would have to send me all the photos so I could put them all together, and then I would make the surprise video.

I had to send them several more messages to remind them of the dates so that I could have everything prepared on her actual birthday. Bit by bit, they sent me their photos (the majority of which were sent on the next to last day, when I was super nervous! But they were truly very original and thoughtful. Thus, I started to get my video ready. First, I had put some photos from our week together, as well as writing some sentences that described what the photos were about. Next, I divided the pictures according to theme (for example: parties, group days with all of our friends, things that had always made us laugh, etc. ) and I inserted what I wrote in between them. Then I put some photos of just us two (some normal, but some funny ones. ) At the end, I wrote an introduction to the surprise of all her friends who contributed to the video, along with their photos.

The most difficult part was finding a song for my video. I had to find a song with good lyrics, but it also had to be important because it would be playing “in the background” of all the photos. After a long time spent searching on YouTube, I found the perfect song to fit the occasion: “Infinite” by Arshad. That song is part of the soundtrack from the movie “The Perks of Being a Wallflower, ” and it’s a really special song because it contains lines from the movie that also make up the lyrics of the song. The song is on the soundtrack CD, but it’s not featured in the movie, only in the summary of what it's about. I really liked that it wasn’t a very well-known song because then we could turn it into our song. So there it was...

When everything was finally prepared (and Anastasia still knowing nothing about the whole thing), we got ready to go out together. I was already ready, but she was taking a long time getting dressed and I was super impatient to show her the video: “Stop taking so long, I want to go out now! ” I told her, and she responded “Okay, okay, only five more minutes. ” When she was finally ready as well, I said “Before leaving, I want to show you something in the living room, ” and she started asking me questions about what it was I wanted to show her. We went to the living where I had put the USB with the video in the TV. I told her to sit down, and then I started it up. At first, she hadn't realized what she was watching, but by the end she was very emotional. After watching it once, she put it on again, because she wanted to see it one more time.

Later on, we went out together. We went out to eat, and then we went for a walk around the neighborhood. We didn't stay out super late because the following morning Athanasia had to wake up really early to go to a village that was a bit outside of Valencia. We celebrated her birthday in a chill and calm manner, but at the same time, in a very special way.

The next morning, Athanasia was going to go on the outing with some Greek friends of hers. She had asked me if I wanted to go with them, but I preferred to stayed to read some passages for my project the following week. When I got up and opened my door, she had already gone, but she had left me a card, in which she thanked me for the surprise and made commentaries about the video (which she had watched more times alone on her computer. ) To this day I still have that card on my board, with our photos, and I look back on how good that day was and what a great time we had.

That is one of the best birthday celebration memories during my time in Erasmus!

Photo gallery