Thanksgiving

This year I celebrated Thanksgiving without my family for the first time in 20 years. I’d like it to be another 20 years at least before I have to do that again. I had a wonderful evening, but it just wasn’t Thanksgiving without my family and my mom’s pumpkin pie. If you’ve ever missed Thanksgiving with your family, I’m sure you know exactly what I mean.

As it was, my Thanksgiving was not too bad. I met my half-American, half-Norwegian friend and her American friend who was visiting and we went to the Hard Rock Café. Very American! We didn’t have reservations so we had to wait a little more than an hour for a table but we didn’t mind. We sat at the bar and had cocktails, speaking English and savoring the feeling of being surrounded by other Americans. (The place was packed with Americans in Paris looking for a taste of home on Thanksgiving.) They were offering a Thanksgiving menu with turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and pie, but it was pretty pricey and I knew the pie would just be disappointing. So I ordered a cheeseburger and a beer and stuffed myself.

After dinner my friends went clubbing but I could not bring myself to spend Thanksgiving clubbing. I went back to my friends’ apartment and used their internet to call my family. Everyone was at my grandparents, so I got to talk to everyone and see everyone on the webcam and it was really great. It still sucked to be missing out on being there, but I felt better being a part of it via computer for at least a little while. I took the liberty of reminding my mother that there are a few Christmas traditions I will be expecting to enjoy this year, including decorating cut-out cookies and eating comfits on Christmas morning. She laughed. Of course she wouldn’t neglect these things, but she knows that I need to remind myself that home will still be home when I come back.

Home will still be home, and my life will still be my life. There will still be classes and debate and my friends and my car, but I know they are going to be different. Not tangibly, but in my mind something will have changed and I will no longer feel the same way that I felt in my life before I came here. That is a scary thought. I knew when I signed up for this that it would mean big changes in my life and my world-view, but I didn’t realize how unstable it would make me feel. Now I know why you are supposed to study abroad during your junior year. I am a senior, so I am making decisions about graduate school and my future, and all while in the midst of a life-changing experience. I feel like I’m not equipped to make any of these decisions right now because I don’t know how I’m going to feel about my life when I get back to America. And yet. I am forging forward with these decisions and trusting that whatever I decide when I get home, I will have had the foresight to leave that option open. This adventure is not going to end when I get on a plane on December 22nd.

Will this adventure ever end?

A Royal Weekend

Another trip, another stamp in my passport – this one read “Londres” and featured a picture of a train. It, along with the postcards and brochures I collected, will be a reminder of one of my favorite weekends from my semester abroad. London was wonderful. I visited Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the London Tower, the War Cabinet Bunker where Churchill directed London’s WWII efforts, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Covent Garden Market and more. London felt good. It felt happy and safe and clean. I am a fan.

Highlights: I got to hear a performance of the Westminster Abbey Choir. I was entering the Abbey, lamenting the fact that I would not be around for the Choir’s Advent concert in two days, when I happened upon the fully assembled Choir about to start a rehearsal. The choir is composed of around 12 men and 26 boys. The boys are all the students of the Westminster Abbey Choir School, which is a boarding school located adjacent to the abbey. I hadn’t heard a live performance of a boy’s choir before and I can’t think of a better choir to hear first. It was pretty cool.

I saw Anne Boleyn’s burial spot, underneath the floor of the Chapel of the London Tower. I saw a castle that played home to Henry VIII. I saw a division of the cavalry ride through the street. I walked through a king’s old hunting grounds. I read a real newspaper! In English! Being the pretty huge nerd that I am, that was definitely one of my favorite things about the weekend. That and all of the Starbucks. They were everywhere! Normally I am not a fan of Starbucks and prefer to frequent locally owned coffeeshops, but in Europe Starbucks is a welcome sight because I know it means the only to-go coffee for miles. France does not believe in putting coffee in a paper cup. I think they call that sacrilege. A cup of coffee to get me going on the way to class? I call that heaven.

I woke this morning to a flurry of snow. More accurately, I woke to find a few lint-like objects floating around in the sky, but it was snow enough for me. My family has a strict rule about Christmas: It is not to be acknowledged, anticipated or decorated for until after Thanksgiving. This rule has no applicability in Europe, of course, because they do not celebrate Thanksgiving. As a result, I have been confronting Christmas for a number of weeks now. My local Metro station has been decorated with lights and tinsel, the street on which it is located has been spanned by giant snowflakes and stars, every gift shop I visited in London was playing Christmas music and my local Monoprix (like Target) long ago opened its display of decorations, chocolates and calendars to celebrate the season. It is earlier than I would normally approve of, but it is comforting. Though I sometimes feel uncomfortably far from home, these things remind me that I am not away from home – just in a different home. I have a bed, a school, a family of friends and a grocery store here. Like it or not, this is my Fall 2008 home. I have been struggling with feelings of homesickness and exasperation, but the snow today reminded me that my life here is what I make it. I may not have Target or McKendree or US Cellular, but I have snow and friends and a bed. What more could I ask for?

I really do love snow. How did I celebrate its brief appearance? I drank a Bud.

November 16th?!?!

I had a great time with Nell! It was so nice to have a visitor to show around Paris. By now all of these things are losing their sparkle for me, so it was nice to remember how impressive everything is when you don't see it every day. We didn't have much time because she was only able to stay for two and a half days, but we saw a fair number of things. Unfortunately, this was the last time I will see her while I am here. I won't see her again until sometime next summer, (sad!) but I am so glad I got to spend this time with her in Europe. It was a lot of fun!

This Wednesday evening I am planning to attend an organ concert at the Cathedral Notre-Dame. I am hoping it will be as impressive as I am anticipating. Thursday morning I am heading out for a weekend in London. I have heard good things about London, so I am looking forward to it. Especially the shopping! :)

Tomorrow I hit the 5 weeks left mark. It feels a bit weird to be this far into it, but it still seems like December 22 is so far away. I'm sure it is going to fly by - I am already surprised to find that I am half-way through November. Being busy these last two weeks has helped move time along, and things will not be slowing down for me until next weekend when I stick around for Thanksgiving. After that it will pick up again with a trip to Rome and exams, so I think this time will be gone before I know it. It's weird to think that in 5 weeks and 1 day I am going to get on a plane and fly home with no idea when I will ever make it back to Europe. It is beautiful over here and I am really enjoying it, but it was not cheap for me to make this trip. I saved for a long time to be able to afford this and depleting all my savings now, plus paying for the three years of law school which are quickly approaching puts me in an unfortunate financial situation. I definitely want to travel a lot in my life, but I am thinking it will be a while before I have the financial clout (and vacation time) to make any trips. It is odd to think that things which are so familiar to me now will be absent from my life for 10, maybe 20 years and when I come back to them everything in my life will be different. I will remember the days when I was here and it will be like looking back on another lifetime. Nothing I’m doing seems all that memorable now, but when my life is a routine of work, eat, sleep, repeat, I am going to miss these nights sitting at the café sipping hot chocolate and checking my email.

5 weeks, 1 day to go...

Only 2 trips left...

Amsterdam was great! It was such a cute little city. Small, smushed-together homes with huge, inviting windows, canals running through every other street, bicycles that wouldn’t end…and houseboats! It rained a lot, but that didn’t make it any less adorable. Among other things, I visited the Anne Frank house, the Heineken Brewery and one of the oldest botanical gardens in the world. Everything was so neat.

I have concluded that I am not a Heineken fan. The brewery was cool and I enjoyed the tour quite a bit, but I’m not the biggest fan of the beer. They did left me draught my own beer at the bar at the end, and I did it perfectly on my first try (which I was pretty proud about – the man who tried after me messed up 3 before he got a decent one), but that did not improve the taste. Of all the beer that I have tasted on my travels, my favorite would be either Guinness or Leffe, a Belgian beer that comes in the tastiest blond. A note on American beer: I have a Parisian friend here who was an exchange student at McKendree last year and he fell in love with Budweiser beer. He had some imported the other week and let one of our German friends from Munich have a taste. Her verdict? “Tastes like a German beer! And you should be very proud, because we Germans know our beer!”

Nell is arriving today for her weekend visit. She will be my first and only visitor in Paris. I can’t wait to see her! This will be the last time I will see her until we are both back in the States again. I am hoping we will be able to visit everything that she wants to see, but it will be tight. There is so much to see in Paris! 3 days is not much time. I am glad she will be here, particularly because McKendree Debate is hosting a tournament this weekend (the first McKendree Invitational ever) and I am missing it. Nell was also a member of the McK Debate team, so I am glad I will have a fellow debater here to keep me company while our team runs a tournament back home. Go Bearcats!

It’s a beautiful, sunny day in Paris. It’s going to be a good day.

An International Affair

I sat down to write a post and came to me that I have not written about my living arrangements. What a thing to neglect! So here goes:

I live in a large, 12-floor apartment building in a neighborhood consisting primarily of apartment buildings, a school and a couple of grocery stores. There is a big, beautiful park nearby where people walk and run on nice days. There are bakeries on every corner - my favorite is close to the metro station. There are a lot of children in the neighborhood and I am often woken up by their screams, which have little trouble passing through my big windows even when they are closed. I have never lived in an apartment building as large as this one and it is quite the experience. There is constant noise through the too-thin walls and more than once I have been woken at 9 a.m. on a Saturday by sounds of construction on the floor above me. Basically, it is difficult to sleep and I am learning to ignore even the loudest noises.

My apartment is on the third floor. It is a tiny 3-bedroom apartment with a kitchen, bathroom and closet to share. Two of the bedrooms are so small they just barely fit 2 beds and 2 desks. The kitchen is so small that a max of two people can prepare dinner at one time, and that is a very tight fit. I was one of the first to move in, so I was lucky enough to get a bed in the biggest bedroom. It has three large patio doors which open onto a balcony, though the balcony is narrow and the view it provides is just one of the balconies of about 100 other apartments facing ours. I have been to the apartments of a variety of exchange students and we have, by far, the smallest apartment, but we also pay the lowest rent. It is tight quarters!

As to the people in my apartment: the six of us represent America, Serbia/Malta, Holland, China, Italy and Djbouti. Quite the mix of cultures! We do our best to get along and be sensitive to each other’s cultural histories, but stick 6 girls in one small apartment with one bathroom to share and you are going to have issues! But we work through them as they come up and things are going smoothly. We talk about the different experiences we have had in our home countries and share stories about our difficulties here. I am jealous of my Dutch roommate who will be going home next week for a big event in her hometown, but I appreciate my arrangement when I think of my Chinese roommate who is doing her whole bachelors here and will not be going home to China until next summer. She will even miss the Chinese New Year, which makes me feel a little less bad about missing Thanksgiving.

This weekend I am going on a school trip to Amsterdam. I’m so excited! It will be good for me to go on another trip – I am getting restless in the city. I will be gone through next Tuesday and on Thursday Nell will arrive from Poland to visit. Busy is good!

Interesting note: All of the Starbucks around have introduced their Christmas drinks and are now playing Christmas music. While I subscribe to the “No Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving” rule, I can’t say that I mind humming along to “I’ll be home for Christmas”…

Halloween and election jitters

Happy November!

This weekend I learned that the majority of Europe does not really celebrate Halloween. Instead they celebrate something called “Carnival” (in whatever native tongue, of course) in February. As I understand it, Carnival lasts for about a week and consists of people dressing up as crazy as they can and getting as drunk as they can. Or something like that. As you may have noticed by now, Europeans have a very liberal attitude toward drinking. In America, drinking is sort of a taboo issue. You can’t really even talk about drinking (except among peers, of course) until you are 21, and then when you do drink, it is supposed to be something you do with a great deal of caution, being careful to overindulge only very rarely. Here the Europeans compete like it is a matter of national pride. “I’m Danish! Danish people are always drunk! That’s what we do!” “Serbian people love to party! Our Carnival goes on for two weeks because we just want an excuse to party!” “I’m German – beer is like water to me.”

The interesting thing about it is difference it makes in their behavior when they have been drinking. In America it is quite typical for multiple people at a party to throw up or pass out. Here, if you throw up it is the grossest thing you could do. To them, throwing up is unacceptable because they were throwing up at age 14, when they first started drinking. It became legal for them to drink beer and wine at 16 (liquor at 18), so they have been drinking for 4 to 5 years at this point in their lives. They don’t throw up and they don’t get out of control. Of course there is always the odd person out – I have been out at pubs and seen people get a bit crazy, but it is much more rare here than in America. It is amazing how much the drinking age affects the drinking culture.

I also learned that Europeans are under the mistaken belief that all Halloween costumes worn in America are scary. They thought that you had to be a witch or ghost or vampire or something else sinister when you dress up for Halloween. I guess that is the spirit of the holiday, but of course you don’t have to dress that way. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve ever worn a scary costume. I have been an ice skater, leftovers and a Greek goddess, but nothing really creepy. Hmm. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong all these years! Haha.

Two days to the election! Ahh! As I (hope I) have mentioned before, I do not have internet in my apartment. The time difference will mean that results are coming in during the middle of the night here and no café with internet will be open for my use. Luckily, my good friends have internet in their apartment and have offered me the use of an extra mattress in their apartment for the night. I am so excited! I don’t think I will sleep at all. And I have class in the morning! Hopefully the final results are in before my class in the morning. Sitting through a 3 hour class would be nothing more than torture. Ahh! So excited!