Thanksgiving

            I celebrated Thanksgiving on Friday night here with my family and Lauren’s family too. The dinner menu was: a turkey (7 kilos!), scalloped potatoes, corn soup, corn casserole, green bean casserole, red cabbage, and chocolate mousse for desert! It felt like a pretty legit Thanksgiving, and if anything it was fancier than I was used to! Lauren and I said a quick prayer before dinner, and then over dessert we discussed what we were all thankful for. That was my favorite part of the night. Everyone in my family talked about how I had changed their life this year, and the speech that came from my dad almost put me to tears. He is such a sweet man and I am so grateful to have him and the rest of my host family over here. I couldn’t ask for more support, love, excitement, and encouragement during my crazy adventure over here! At the end of the night, I was asked to play one song for our guests, which ended up turning into about 10! But I had fun trying to get the others to sing along, and by the end of the night I had a full back up choir for ‘Hallelujah’. Overall, it was just a beautiful night, and it felt like a Thanksgiving done right! Babsi even said she thinks they will keep celebrating Thanksgiving even after I’m gone, because she loved the tradition. I was touched!

The families (minus my host dad who took the photo)

Babsi even set up Xmas lights and candles!

Chocolate Mousse Babsi and I made for dessert!

            On Saturday, we met with some family friends to bake Christmas cookies together. This has been a tradition between these two families since Theresa was 2, so there were definitely some emotions in the air because Philipp (my host brother on exchange in Alaska) wasn’t there for the first time. But it was a wonderful day of making sweet shaped cookies and thoughtfully decorated gingerbread men! We finished the night by seeing the latest “Twilight” movie. We went with some of Theresa’s friends, and one who didn’t speak German so we saw it in English. It was actually pretty decent, and was nice to hear some English for a little while!

If you can't tell from the bags under my eyes, I was sooo exhuasted!

Me, Theresa, and Johanna

My gingerbread man was sporting some typical Austrian Leiderhosen!

My Gingerbread Family

 

            The past few days at school have been pretty good. A girl in my class is planning an exchange to Spain in January and has all sorts of questions for me. Once I start talking about my exchange everyone surrounds and listens. I think it’s a pretty interesting topic! I also had fun today exchanging bad words with the boys in my class. They would teach me a bad word in German, describe it, and then I’d translate it to English. We were all giggling quite a bit. One kid found the word ‘dung’ and I told him what it meant. He thought it was the funniest thing ever, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him that no one really uses that word anymore (especially not as a cuss word) so I just let him enjoy! My language is definitely progressing again! Today in class I was playing a game on my phone, and I realized I understood what the teacher was saying without even trying to pay attention! It is still a little frustrating because I’m starting to know all the words a teacher says in a sentence, but the grammar is so different that it takes me a while to switch it all around to make sense. And by that time I’ve missed the next few sentences. But I’m working on it!