26.11.10

A True German Thanksgiving...er, what?


Well, as I'm sure you all knew, yesterday was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is probably one of my most favorite holidays of all. Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas, it's awesome, but I also really love Thanksgiving. I love that all my extended family gets together in Berkeley to spend time together and be loud and rambunctious, and I love that I also get to have a Thanksgiving with my other side of the family that is smaller and I love that my mom, stepdad, brother and I now have a tradition of serving Thanksgiving in the City (San Francisco).

Enough about how great my family is, let me tell you what thanksgiving is like in Heidelberg: anticlimactic. I got up, went to work, went to my internship (where I got to make a bear hand puppet out of a brown paper lunch bag and I got to color and it was really fun). I watched the Macy's Day Parade online with Haleigh which was awesome because it was so traditional and
American, and we laughed at the cheese factor of Matt Lauer and Katie Couric. Matt Lauer actually said "what's more American than Pizza?"- there was an actual pizza team! What did they do? twirl pizza dough.

Our program had a dinner for us at a restaurant in the area (fun fact: they've had Thanksgiving in the same restaurant for 24 years), which was a lot of fun- we dressed up a little, and got to talk in English with our professors who pretend like they don't know English the rest of the year. My table was especially fun- Aaron, his parents and his Pfarrer, Frau Heckmann (our resident director), Herr Doerr (the most amazing German Professor ever), Brian and Dan.

Dinner was pretty good for it being a German Thanksgiving, but it was nowhere near as good as a real Thanksgiving dinner!

It snowed on Thanksgiving, although it was only for a little while, and it didn't stick. It was still really exciting for me. As you can see from the pictures, it's Christmas in Heidelberg! The last one shows the show on the top of a mountain in town. It's unbelievably beautiful here right now. I'm loving the snow!


3 comments:

  1. Are you sure about Katie Couric? We had Meredith Vieira on our talking box.

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  2. Sarah, you will love Christmas in Germany, eh? I remember going to a small village called Monschau and it was like a fairy tale. They closed down all the streets and it was wonderful. Got there and post some picks for me :-)

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  3. I am not sure about Katie Couric, I just assumed it was her, I didn't actually see much of the announcer.

    and Uncle Chris- it's already started to be that beautiful fairy-tale-like atmosphere. Except I get to be grumpy about "those tourists" blocking MY Hauptstrasse :) I'm going to one of HD's Weihnachtsmarkt tomorrow, and I will definitely take and post pictures, but I don't know that I can promise a trip to Monschau!

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