Thanksgiving

I was pretty bummed out about not getting to celebrate Thanksgiving on the actual day- I had been wasn't expecting that feeling to hit me, especially since I knew I had the Saturday celebration to look forward to. In any case, I did get to celebrate, just a few days later, but with fantastic food and new friends.

Michelle is an assistant (as all of us at the Thanksgiving are) living in Ouistreham. It's the port city, just north of Caen where some of the ferries from England come out. Michelle finished her Peace Corps assignment in Benin this August, so she has been used to doing Thanksgivings abroad and scrounging together other Americans. Michelle also has a huge apartment and loves to cook, and to top it all off, is an awesome cook. Her stuffing (sorry to whoever makes the stuffing in my family) absolutely the best I've had. It had sausage, walnuts and apples- simply amazing. She also made the turkey and a pumpkin pie. It was pot luck style for other dishes- I brought cranberry sauce, cider and apple pie. With all of us and the food it was awesome. Great people, food and conversation. I stayed overnight, because between trains and buses it would have been a quick trip otherwise, and so did Lydia, an assistant in Carentan.

While it wasn't the insane proportions of food in Dakar, or in the Kzoo caf (with some of the greatest people I know) it certainly made France feel more like home.

Dear France

Dear OFII (Office Français de l'Immigration et de l'Intégration),

Thank you so much for letting me change my first medical visit appointment. It was kind of silly of you to put it in the middle of the Toussaint vacation so that was cool of you to say you would just send me a new date.

However, since it's been over a month since a first called, and I've called each week in November asking when I would receive my new date, and you keep saying next week, and yet I still receive nothing, so this is getting kind of ridiculous and I'm sick of it.

On Monday, when I call yet again, can you please not be on vacation and can you please actually send me the papers this time?

Merci,
Anna

Dear Internet Provider of Lycee Lebrun,

I am actually quite thankful you exist, and that I realize have a pretty good internet situation, especially compared to other people. But that really made my Thanksgiving Day, having the internet crap out for absolutely no reason at 7 pm to 9 am this morning. Even better was that I didn't have any phone credit so I could call anyone back. Or look up thanksgiving recipes I needed online. That plus the whelks that the Frenchies kept trying to get me to eat at lunch really just added to the overall spirit of the day. Who wants to talk to family and friends on Thanksgiving anyway? It's much more fun to have spaghetti for dinner again.

Can't wait until next time!
Anna

Happy Thanksgiving!

From a student who speaks English much better than he pays attention:

"Zee Macy's Zanksgiving parade is when zee president kills the turkey at the end, oui?"


And if that wasn't enough fun, pretty much the grossest Thanksgiving joke ever:

Farting Your Guts Out

Bob and Martha have been married for 15 years. Every morning for 15 years, Bob wakes up, farts loudly, rolls over onto his back and gets up for work.

Every morning for 15 years, Martha says, "One of these days, you're gonna fart your guts out!"

One Thanksgiving morning, Martha's preparing the turkey and gets an idea. Before her husband gets up, she creeps upstairs and places the turkey innards in his pajama bottoms, giggling to herself.

Well, later that morning, Bob wakes up and goes through his morning ritual. He screams as he goes running into the bathroom. Martha laughs, but is concerned after noticing that Bob has been in the bathroom for 3 hours.

She runs upstairs, and is about to knock on the door, when Bob opens up, pale as a ghost. He says, "You were right. You were right. I did fart my guts out, but by the grace of God and these two fingers I got them back up there again."

Cité de la Mer- Cherbourg

On Sunday I made a trip to Cherbourg to visit Cité de la Mer. Cité de la Mer is the tallest (deepest?) aquarium in Europe and some cool exhibits. It's definitely geared towards children but it's fun all the same. We drove up there in the grey morning, which was a nice change from the train. After getting our tickets we first took the tour with audio guide of the submarine. IT'S HUGE! I can't imagine living in that confined space and not seeing the light of day for several months with 135 other people.

I couldn't even fit the whole thing in one photo!

We finished the audio guides just in time to head over to the “attraction.” We weren't really sure what this entailed, but it turned out to be ok. Basically there's this whole back story they've created about how our groups is going to be exploring the next frontier, the bottom of the sea. They made you go through these different “training modules” which are pretty hilariously stupid and then go “on the voyage” in one of those flight simulator type things. After that you are sat down to watch a video of the news conference announcing the epic trip to the world. They piece into the video small snippets from the “training modules” that we had just done to actually have us on the “news conference.” Overall, cute, not super impressive, but like most things there, probably a lot cooler if I was 10.

Meike and I then headed over to the main attraction, the aquarium. The aquarium was 2 stories high and you could look at it from three different levels. At the very bottom you could look up to the top giving a little mermaid effect to it.

"Look at this stuff, isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my collection's complete? "

There were all kinds of cool fish swimming around with different designs and bright colors. They also had some specialty type small tanks with other fish in them and a large touch tank with sting rays and shark-type looking things. They looked like they were hungry for fingers, ready to jump out of the tank and there was no museum guide or anything so Meike and I kept our distance from that one.

Les poissons de confiture. Ok, the french for jellyfish is actually "la méduse" but I like my name a lot better.

Because of our timing and skipping some of the younger interactive sections, our trip to Cherbourg was pretty short. Nothing is open on Sunday, so we headed back soon after leaving the museum. A fun day out to try something new!

Time Management

I'm clearly not in college anymore. I will probably have to stay up until about 2/2h30 to get everything finished and I'm about to call that a "late night." Granted France is lacking in a 24h "Dairy Mart" to buy 69 cent sodas, snacks and RedBull, so everything is just topsy-turvy.

Updates on my weekend to hopefully come tomorrow!

The Sun!

A beautiful sunset from the other night
And the 10 day weather forecast


I'm off to go catch the last bit of vitamin D available for today!

Thanksgiving Lessons

I don't have much planned yet, but if you google "Thanksgiving ESL" in only a few clicks you will be led to a powerpoint entitled "How to deep fry a turkey"

Tomorrow's Vocab list:
Tur-duck-en
Cherpumple
Food baby
Turkey Coma
Mystery Relative

Useful phrases:
Pass to the right
Pass to the left
No! I said it's always counter clockwise!
Where's the wine?
Is the game on?

Activities:
Traced hand Turkeys
Defining "salad"
What are you thankful for?

I love cultural exchanges!

Update: In case for some reason you don't know what a cherpumple is: