An International Thanksgiving!

I find it extremely ironic that although I was France for Thanksgiving, I somehow managed to have 3 Thanksgivings, more than I would have had if I had been in the States! Also, I have explained the story of thanksgiving probably about six times now in the past week. :]

Thanksgiving number one:
My French class decided to do an international Thanksgiving feast where everyone brought something traditional from their country. To sum it up it was very nontraditional and delicious. We had food from Japan, China, Korea, Spain, Bolivia, Russia, Britain and of course the U.S.!

I decided to go for the thing that Americans are stereotyped to make the best even though it's not really Thanksgivingy, chocolate chip cookies. It was quite an adventure to make them here though. First I had to get the recipe and translate the ingredients since things like baking soda aren't in my french vocab yet. Then after a bit of searching in the store I had everything I needed. Also, chocolate chips are ridiculously expensive here, so I bought bars of chocolate and crushed them all into chunks by hand. The next thing I had to do was convert all the units from cups to liters; somehow an error was made and I had way less sugar than needed, so the first batch kind of flattened into a thin layer of cookie cake which then proceeded to burn, BUT the situation was salvaged and batch two was a success :] Just like home.

So, I brought the cookies as promised and everyone loved them and many people asked for the recipe! We had a nice dinner and we even went around the table saying all the things that we were thankful for. It's a little more stressful to do it in French and needless to say, things got a little emotional as everyone was thankful for all the amazing experiences and the people they've meet during their stay. We do spend 20 hours a week together as a class after all.

My favorite moment of the meal was when Nadya started singing the song "All By Myself" and everyone joined in, INCLUDING my teacher who never ever speaks English to us. Everyone was laughing and it felt so much like a family dinner :] 

They made us fresh sushi on the spot!

After our meal we played pictionary and taboo in french which was fun. My favorite pictionary moment was when Andy was supposed to draw "les toilettes" and the first thing he thought to draw was the man and woman stick figure signs, rather than just to draw a toilet.

Thanksgiving number two:

After school on Friday I went over to Jessicas where she and Sheridan had cooked a Thanksgiving meal from scratch! It was amazing: turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, rolls, pumpkin pie, apple pie, gravy, green beans, chocolate and wine (We are still in France of course!) 

Cutting up the turkey

They had drawn hand turkeys which they put our names on and put on our plates. Then Jessica's host dad put on a cd of famous American music... Grease! So we celebrated Thanksgiving with the sounds of John Travolta in the background. 

Thanksgiving number three:

Danielle had a huge Thanksgiving party in which 17 people attended! It was a huge feast! The food was great and it was fun because it was a mixture of French and Americans. I practiced lots of French, drank some warm apple cider and just enjoyed myself. Ironically all the frenchmen were studying computer science, so I felt a little like I was back at Michigan Tech and enjoyed talking about math in French for a little while :]

So in conclusion: although I missed my family and didn't really want to go to school no Thanksgiving, it was still a successful holiday for which I am very thankful.