Rosetta: A French Thanksgiving

Today I had two hours of class in the morning and two hours of class in the afternoon. The two hours in the morning consisted of having 21 students individually spend 5 minutes describing their internships to me. Everyone was pretty much the same and I had already spent quite a deal of time talking to students about this subject so it was very boring. But at least it went quickly. I was in charge of grading the students on a 1-10 scale. The highest score I gave was an 8 and the lowest a 3, I am not sure if that was what the teacher had in mind but she seemed to be in agreement with the scores I gave. My afternoon classes consisted of 4 groups of 4 students for 20 minutes each. The first 3 groups were a struggle. The students would come in and all sit in their chairs quietly in a row. And I had to try really hard to get even a couple of words out of them much less a whole sentence. But the last group came in and one girl sat in a chair at the edge of the room without a desk, and one girl sat ON the desk across from her and the other two students put themselves in a sort of semi-circle with them. So I went ahead and sat on the desk next to the girl and we all just chatted the whole time. We talked about school, movies, weekend plans, they asked me questions about me and I explained certain phrases when they came up (go back versus come back). It was so much fun, we laughed a lot and everyone spoke English. I left school today feeling just so happy. When I got home I did some paper work with the other assistants in order to get money to help pay for rent. It was stressful because it was in French and we didn't know all the right responses. We will see if what we put works out or not. Tomorrow we are celebrating Thanksgiving. This was completely unexpected for me. When my friends asked what I was going to do for Thanksgiving I had always just said, "nothing." But I mentioned that Thursday was Thanksgiving to Florie, the Spanish teacher, and she got super excited and invited herself over to our house for dinner. Then she invited her friends and started planning the meal. Today she bought all the food and made the mashed potatoes and some other Thanksgivingy foods. She is so happy about it and has done pretty much everything already. Tomorrow I am going to her house to cook the birds (they don't have Turkey here until December because it is a Christmas food but she bought a couple smaller birds of some sort), and finish up the cooking. We will bring everything here and eat a real Thanksgiving meal with my new friends. I am pretty happy about it.