Wednesday I ran into one of the teachers I worked with in Metz in centre ville in Nancy, and upon seeing me she almost had a heart attack from surprise.  I guess when I didn't come back to Metz, everyone assumed I went back to the US.  I was under the impression that language exchange Carlos with whom I am still in touch, would have informed everyone, but apparently not.  She was most excited to hear that Carlos and I are still together (jumping and down and clapping), and she encouraged me to come back to Metz to hang out with the teachers from Cormontaigne since I was pretty close to a lot of them.  Running into someone I have known for a while definitely makes me feel less like I am a foreign culture.  That is not to say that I feel out of place here, but that seeing someone I know makes me feel a little less transitional.

Thursday was my friend JP's birthday so we all got together and had a big birthday dinner for him, which was lovely, but I was out a little late despite my early class.  Had class all day Friday and then had to run home and get ready for Thanksgiving.  It was a potluck so I didn't have TOO much work to prepare for it.  I prepared the sweet potato casserole and the turkey.  I am probably going to Thanksgiving hell.  It was bad enough when I bought pre-seasoned frozen turkey breasts, but then when the guest list got out of control last minute I ran to the store and had to get frozen turkey nuggets.  My profoundest apologies to the pilgrims and Indians currently rolling in their graves.  We had a turn out of about 16 people, representatives of 5 countries, I think.  It was a lot of fun, although parties are always a little bit less fun when you are playing hostess.  I bought construction paper and made everyone make Indian headdresses, because in my opinion, you can't dive right into the holiday without understanding all of the arts and crafts and pilgrim and Indian pageants we had wearing decorated brown paper bags that we underwent as children.  The party was very festive with lots of good food, and of course we all said what we were thankful for.  The only casualty of the evening was my bed which broke (well it was already sort of broken) under the weight of a lot of people sitting on it.  At the end of the party, my friend S  (half French half Ghanan but grew up in London) told me how much they enjoyed it and really appreciated the premise of the holiday and intends to continue to celebrate it in the future.

My alarm went off early on Saturday, and at first I thought I'd set it on accident, but then remembered that it was for my trip to Trier.  My three closest friends were slated to go as well, but I felt sure that after we all stayed out late Thursday and Friday that someone wasn't going to make it to the train station.  Surprisingly we all made it and had a lovely day abroad.  Trier is the oldest city in Germany so there are some interesting Roman ruins and a lot of things that date from emperor Constantine.  In the gorgeous cathedral there is what is supposedly Jesus' seamless cloak is kept, which I was not able to really see since they only take it out every 50 years or so.  I did however, see the thingy that it is kept in, which was pretty neat.

We spent most of the day at the Christmas markets, which were really impressive and hold their place as my favorites thus far (better than Strasbourg, Colmar, Metz, and Nancy).  We even ran into the king of Ghana who made an appearance at the markets.  The funniest thing about being in Germany was for the first time in a long time I was almost completely linguistically unequipped.  I had made the faulty assumption that among the four of us cultured people we would have enough German to get by, but all we were able to muster was "hello" "goodbye" "excuse me" "I have a little table" "my name is..." "applesauce with prunes" numbers through ten and a few other useless expressions.   I know that a lot of Germans speak English, but we didn't seem to find any of them, which left us (rather comically) struggling to communicate.  It's funny because even in Spain I am able to communicate although maybe not smoothly, though usually in public I don't need to since I have Carlos.  It was just kind of shocking after dedicating so much of my time to language learning (and teaching!) to suddenly be somewhere without a single word.

I will try to publish some pictures from Tgiving and Germany soon!