OOPS

I was looking back through all my blogs and realized that I forgot one very critical point during my stay here. Thanksgiving! I apologize for having forgotten, but I think the reason is because Thanksgiving happened to fall on the day after mom left France. But I won't forgive myself if I don't share how wonderful my Thanksgiving day was!

Or rather, how strange it was. We all knew signing up, there were going to be certain family events we would miss out on. In an attempt to mollify our nostalgia for Thanksgiving, IES/France made a valiant effort to give us a traditional, American Thanksgiving. Let me just say right now, nice try, but no thank you. IES consists of 60 girls and 19 boys (those lucky guys, eh?), plus all of our host parents/siblings, and the staff of IES. This amounts to...a lot of people. You may remember me mentioning that French restaurants tend to seat three or four people comfortably at a time. I'm sure it was quite a task to find a restaurant for so many people.

Once we were all crammed in there, they passed around various glasses of something bright and colorful while we all made polite yet awkward conversation with each other in various languages. And then! came the meal. We started out French style with a salad--which had fish in it. Please name one American who has fish for Thanksgiving. Needless to say, they had lots of leftover fish. Then we had our main meal brought out to us. Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and roasted nuts. Sounds pretty normal, right? If by normal you mean turkey so dry, I literally had no more moisture left in my mouth to eat it, stuffing that resembled anything BUT stuffing (I had to ask the waitress what it was and she rolled her eyes like...duh? stuffing?). This stuff looked like meatloaf. Come to think of it, I don't think those were cranberries, either. They were kind of small. And the nuts...well...they were nuts (pun intended). Oh, I almost forgot the canned potatoes. Yes, such a thing does exist.

But, my favorite part of the night has to be the pumpkin pie. I know the lighting in the restaurant was kind of funny, but I swear that pumpkin pie was glowing. It was definitely neon orange and I was afraid I was putting something radioactive into my body. Again, that restaurant had lots of leftovers.

The good thing about having Thanksgiving dinner with 78 other Americans who were also missing their traditional family Thanksgiving is that we were all able to laugh our butts off at this pathetic attempt at a Thanksgiving. The only bad thing was, the French had no idea why were all laughing hysterically and only eating half of our food (I say blame the fish). It definitely made us sit around and appreciate how cooking a turkey has been made into an art form by our brothers, uncles, whoever. The smell of bread rolls is probably the best thing ever to wake up to. Thanksgiving is the only time of year it's acceptable to eat seven different kinds of dessert. The seven different kinds of desserts that came from seven different arguing family members who claim THEIRS was the best LAST year. Potatoes are a staple, in whatever form. Cranberry sauce, regardless of the source, is always perfect--mostly because it just looks festive. And no matter what anybody else says, our moms make the best pie crust. So, even though France tried and failed to give us the Thanksgiving experience, we all had a blast just being together and appreciating how crazy our families can be during the holidays. I know we're all looking forward to more craziness with Christmas meals!