Joyeux Noel, Feliz Navidad, Merry Christmas!

Christmas songs are in the air, the trees and lights are up all throughout the town but wait. It does not feel like Christmas! I think it has got to be the little differences such as no snow, my real family is not with me, and I have not had the "before" holidays like Thanksgiving and Halloween. Okay I had Halloween but it was very lame.

So Christmas here was set up pretty close to the same way we do christmas at my house. Go to church than after to one grandparents house, open presents, eat a meal, enjoy everyones company, and talk politics. The next morning we get a stocking to open and a couple presents from Santa and we open them, play with all the stuff we got, watch the 24 hour Christmas Story Marathon and finally for dinner we go over to the other grandparents house, open more presents, eat a nice meal, enjoy everyone, and talk some more politics.

Here it went like this: Go to a Catholic mass for 2 1/2 hours, then to one grandparents, opened presents, shared what we got, ate appetizers, ate a very nice meal with many plates, though one plate was not so nice though I will share that with you a bit later, then talked and drank for a bit and went home. The next morning we woke up slowly, once everyone was downstairs we opened our gifts from each other, then had 10 minutes to change for lunch at the other grandparents house went there opened gifts, ate appetizers and another meal with many plates, drank and talked and went home to enjoy the rest of the afternoon.

So I guess it was not to different but I think being away from that "family tradition" just made it seem less of Christmas, though it was a lovely experience nonetheless. Now for the meal, the French are huge into food and Christmas happens to be the biggest, most done up meal of the whole year so of course we had a cheese plate, and a dessert, and a first and second plate and a plate with a substance only known to me as "foie gras." It was not horrible but definatly was not my favorite thing we ate that night. The next day we had the same thing so I asked if it was a tradition to eat this they said yes so I once again took a little bit of it (Thumbs up to me following the exchange students try everything three times rule right!?) and this time there was a semi-English speaker who told me it's duck liver. Yum! Duck liver. Come to find out it is actually specially fattened liver AND the specially fattened comes from the force feeding of duck and goose! Now I am not an animal rights activist at all but I find it funny how here if I even bring up hunting everyone is like you hunt because here there is not many animals to hunt so they are very protective of not hunting the few animals they have, so hunters kind of anger the general population. Yet they force feed duck and geese. Interesting right?

So this was pretty much my Christmas and thank you to everyone who sent me Christmas gifts and to my host family for getting me gifts also! Everyone is getting there presents from me when I get back because shipping is crazy expensive!

Going to Jersey!

If I told you I was in Jersey would you believe me?

Well I was. Though probably not the Jersey you were thinking of! I was on a little tiny island between Normandy and Brittany named Jersey! The best part? After 4 months of speaking only French I was able to speak English for a day on the island. The Island is British and I even got my passport stamped and I caused a bit of confusion since im not sure they have ever had an American, living in France under a French visa who decided to take a vacation to Jersey. Thats okay, we got it all figured out fairly quickly. The boat ride over there took a little over one hour, there was a huge storm, reminence of a hurricane, that made the waves huge and made most of my host family and many other people on the boat sea sick. I ended up staying outdoors the whole boat ride there and back because even myself on the inside of the boat was feeling pretty sick. When we got to the Island they stamped my passport and we were on our way. We decided to first take the bus to go to another part of the island to see the "beauty" first. After we went back the the central town for shopping. The island has one road with almost every shop on the island on that one road so it was easy to not get lost and made shopping quite simple. I bought gifts for my host family and a few little things for myself including a watch and a pair of tights. (Though I really did NEED those things!) Sarah was with my host family and me. Sarah and I went shopping just the two of us for the whole day for lunch we ate spicy tomato soup and English tea and had a very nice time shopping. On the way home, it was cold and dark but I again stayed outside the whole time on the boat. When we finally got back we were all very tired, I was feeling sick and we finally got to bed at about midnight. It was a very nice day but unfortunatly I woke up with a fever and felt like I was hit by a truck. Yes, I woke up with the flu on the second day of break. Welcome to the life of being an exchange student. Sickness number 4 in 4 months.