Thanksgiving

I hope that your spirits are feeling refreshed and your bellies are feeling full after your Thanksgiving celebrations!
I decided that last week I would do a lesson in my classes on Thanksgiving. I shared some of our customs and traditions with my students including; Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Black Friday (which I heard was even worse than usual this year), and all of the food that we eat on Thanksgiving Day. I had them make lists of 10 things they were thankful for and some of them had a hard time coming up with 10...can you do it? :) Lastly, I gave them an outline of the history of Thanksgiving and asked them to role play it in small groups...some of them were hilarious! I especially liked the groups that had special Native American dances or head-dressings. :) The main questions from the students about Thanksgiving were...does everyone travel home for this holiday? And if they do, is there a lot of traffic congestion? I reminded them that I'm from Iowa and traffic jams are pretty much nonexistent! They cannot even picture what that must be like...
On the actual day of Thanksgiving I headed to the orphanage for my weekly visit and I got a good reminder to be thankful - for washing machines! If you are a mom maybe you can already guess what happened...yep, I got peed on by a little boy. I just had to laugh about it as all of the Chinese workers looked hesitantly at me, probably thinking, "What's the foreigner going to do??"
On both Friday and Saturday I went to Thanksgiving celebrations with some Americans here in Tianjin. Friday's celebration was with people from my organization and it was really nice...we ate a lot of food, watched a movie, played games...all of the things I would do at home! It really helped me to not feel as homesick on this holiday that I love. Two of the pictures included are from this day - Cindy and Lizzy are at the top, the hosts of the event and my friend, Jessica, and I are below, with our matching outfits.


On Saturday the big treat was REAL TURKEY! I am not sure how or where they got it but I was so thankful to see it because turkey is not a main meat here in China. Below is a picture of the group I was with on Saturday.


As this holiday of giving thanks wraps up, I want to say that I am SO thankful for each and every one of you reading this blog. You mean so much to me and I am blessed to know you all. My life is better with you in it! I hope that we can all continue this spirit of thanksgiving throughout the year.
And now it's back to real-life, with Christmas around the corner. I found a small Christmas tree today and hung some lights...Christmas is Christmas no matter what tiny corner of this vast globe we occupy...