Thanksgiving is a two week long holiday. Christmas is two months.

Yup, the French love their holiday seasons. To do things the right way, Katherine and I made our own Thanksgiving dinner. Please read "Katherine and I" as "Katherine cooked, I took orders." She knew how to make stuffing from scratch (I was very impressed by this), so we made stuffing, corn bread, green beans, and turkey. It was super fun.

flowers from my parents :-)

My only intellectual contribution. We had extra bread and apples so I suggested mixing them with cinnamon sugar and butter. It was a tasty dessert!

Tuesday was just a normal busy day. Wednesday, I went to a hilarious play with my seminar that spoofed Parisians in relation to Americans in every aspect of life-- clubbing, restaurants, metro, etc. We went to see it at the perfect time because I had been in Paris long enough to get all the references but I had enough time left to thoroughly enjoy watching the stereotypes play out. Thursday, I went back to the Musée d'Orsay, which was a million times better the second time because a) I wasn't jet-lagged and b) I understood the significant changes that occurred during the period shown in the museum! It was great! Friday we had to go to a movie for reasons that escape me. They paid for it, thank goodness, but it was a really dumb movie that most people slept through. Afterwards I wished I had slept through it. Did I mention that I don't like French cinema? Nothing ever happens, and artistic stuff just doesn't do it for me. Now that I've gotten my uncultured rant out of the way, the day took a turn for the more exciting. I met up with my friend Liz and we went to a cafe to try hot wine for the first time. 

It's really sweet tasting. I liked it!

Afterwards, we went to a Christmas market. At the end of the market, there's a ferris wheel that I have yet to go up but would really like to!

The room where they put the reels on was actually open!

Saturday was a really busy day, though I didn't really expect it to be at first. I met up with a friend to have lunch and see a movie called l'Illusioniste, though it had nothing at all to do with The Illusionist with Edward Norton. It was a movie in the style of The Triplets of Belleville, by the same producer, and beautiful but poignant. After that, we went to the Arc de Triomphe! By this time it was getting closer to sunset, so get ready for some beautiful pictures :-).

In remembrance of the French students who fought against the invading Nazi army November 11, 1940, risking their lives.

Video footage from inside the arc as to what was happening directly below us. Kind of sweet!

Looking down the Champs!

Yeah, that picture was actually of the sky, not Paris...

Did I mention that I like taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower?

That evening, I met up with a friend and ended up staying out with her and two of her French friends in the Saint-Michel area (by Notre Dame) until 4:30 AM. Needless to say, my Sunday mainly consisted of quietly watching TV in bed after waking up late. Tuesday, my art history class had another visit! This time we went to the Musée Marmottan, which is a Monet museum. It's also in a beautiful old house. There weren't that many of his uber famous ones (and after seeing the Monet exhibition with 200 of his best, it's hard to be impressed), but I still really enjoyed it. We saw works from his early life-- apparently he did caricatures for a while! I then took the bus home because I didn't realize quite how far away I was from home... it took me an hour and a half. It was totally worth it, though, because I saw the Champs-Elyssés lit up at night! During this time, I was also in the middle of a Harry Potter debacle. Apparently in Paris they do something called avant-première, which I assumed meant the midnight showing, but for some reason it meant two nights before it came out at midnight. So I missed it. And spent all of Tuesday trying to figure out if I missed it. And then, it turned out that I didn't miss it, but I didn't find out until Wednesday afternoon. Quel horreur! In any case, I went to see it Wednesday night and all was right with the world (keep in mind this is a full 5 days after the U.S. got the film and all of my U.S. friends had been talking about it!). Thursday was Thanksgiving. I went to the Galeries Lafayette to look at their fancy windows before heading to IES's version of a Thanksgiving dinner.

Karaoke!!

Hehe it's a crab

Christmas tree inside Printemps! Not nearly as big as the Christmas tree inside Galerie Lafayette, but still big!

Our Thanksgiving dinner was an extremely typical French meal. It took around 3 hours, consisted of four leisurely-brought courses, and was absolutely fantastic. The one thing missing was wine, but I somehow survived a dinner without it. We had pumpkin soup, turkey, sweet potatoes, cheesecake, and coffee (coffee is its own course). Yum!! I then went home and got on Skype, where I got to talk to the whole Dearing family, which was really great. I missed them all!! 

I then took the train to Oxford the next morning. Look out for that update soon!