Time to Catch Up

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Hello Everyone,
My winter vacation is quickly coming to an end and now I need to update you all on what I've been up to. Since my last blog was in November I will start from there. Thanksgiving in Italy was interesting. Most Italians just have no real concept of what Thanksgiving is about. Many of my teachers were asking about our holiday as if it were some strange pagan ritual of stuffing your face. Of course to them if it isn't a Catholic holiday they get out their ten foot poles and poke at it saying "Que Cosa?" My on-site teacher even thought that Black Friday was another strange holiday of ours, but we laughed and told her that it was just the day that the Christmas shopping madness takes over the nation.
So my roommates and I made our own Thanksgiving dinner, and Azzurra and I were the only ones who knew how to cook a turkey...sort of. We had eight people coming to our dinner, so Katie got a freaking huge bird that had to have been atleast 12-15 pounds. Azzurra was going to have class all day, so cooking the turkey was my chore for the day. I prepared it just fine, shoved it into the tiny oven our neighbors let us use, and was basting it thinking this wasn't so hard when Azzurra comes home and points out to me that the turkey is upside down. I hang my head in shame, but to give an excuse I was exhausted as we had been working incredibly hard in class that morning. Luckily we were able to flip the turkey and brown the skin. It turned out perfect and so I have made my first Thanksgiving turkey...in Itlay. One of Azzurra's Italian friends, Raph (since we can't properly pronounce his full name this is what we call him), came to our dinner since he had never been to a Thanksgiving dinner. He enjoyed it immensely. We are always trying to teach him new American slang terms and that night we actually got him to understand "That's what she said", however he does not see why we think it is so funny.
After this little holiday, the finals quickly approached and my roommates and I were going crazy trying to finish everything. This is why I didn't update my blog. I was working on a ten page paper about the influence of natural disasters on the innovations made in art conservation and completing my portfolio on all the work I had done throughout the semester which turned out to be another 20...or was it more?... pages worth of writing. I was so sick of typing after that point I didn't even want to think of writing for my blog. So that was November for me. Afterwards I flew to China to spend Christmas with my sister, which I will talk about in my next entry.

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