to be reconnaissante

First of all, I promised visual aids, so here they are. Not of the house, since they're Anna's photos that I stole from Facebook and they were all taken at 2bis (I forgot my camera last night), but at least you can see our Cambrai Thanksgiving. It was delightful. Out of the ten of us in Cambrai, five are American, and then we have two Germans, an Austrian, a Costa Rican, and a Brit, so it was the first Thanksgiving for more than half of the people last night, which was very endearing. We tried to do it up right, with a turkey and cranberry sauce and stuffing and mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie and brussels sprouts and green bean casserole and stuffed mushrooms and all the things that go along with Thanksgiving, including a prayer, listening to "Alice's Restaurant" and that Adam Sandler song, and forcing the others to say what they were thankful for. It was fairly wonderful. Matthias carved the turkey under my supervision (which I thought was amusing, since I'm a vegetarian girl, but I was the one who knew how), and we all stuffed ourselves silly and then sat around playing cards and finishing off the Beaujolais Nouveau (and remembering why it's supposed to be chilled) and some Orangina made from blood oranges.

It was a good week. Out of the twelve hours I'm supposed to teach, I did around six. I'm not sure I've ever actually worked twelve hours in a week since I got here, actually. Well, I am at work for more than twelve hours, I'm just not doing anything most of the time. There are some organizational problems at the moment because one of the teachers is out sick and she just got a replacement. I think it will work itself out, though. We had to go to Lille this week for a second teacher training day, but now we're apparently fully fledged assistants and can handle anything! Always good to know.

Things are exciting in Cambrai! The faire last week for Ste. Catherine's day (even though it was what, yesterday?) was huge and fairly amazing. Anna and I bought a kitchen gadget that I later found cheaper somewhere else, but that's fine. We each paid less than one of us would have at the store. It was a huge market, basically, that stretched from the grande place up to the train station and back down almost to the office of tourism. I suppose that doesn't sound that big, but if you look at the map you can see that it goes from the Rue de Lille down the Rue d'Alsace-Lorraine, across the Place Aristide Briande, and down the Avenue de la Victoire to the Rue de Noyon or so, and then up and down all the little streets around the Place, of course. (Then if you want to learn more about Cambrai, here is the Wikipedia page - I am so amused that it's twinned with Houma, where Aunt Patty lives.)

So we had Ste. Catherine's, which is a feast day that celebrates unmarried women between the ages of about 18 and 25 (hurray! except that it's to try to inspire us to get husbands), and we had our Cambrai Thanksgiving, and soon enough the Christmas Market will open, which we're all really excited about because apparently there's going to be ice skating, and no matter how grownup we like to say we are these days (for instance, I cooked yesterday without spilling anything on myself), we're all really, really excited about ice skating, especially Cata, who wants to see all this snow and ice stuff that we've been talking about and she's never experienced. Michelle has promised us a proper English Christmas dinner, with mince pies and all - we'll be celebrating early, before everyone leaves for the holidays, and it will be wonderful.

Tonight we're going to see The Queen in English. Should be excellent. We saw Scoop the other day, since there's some special thing going on this week where they show movies in their original versions with subtitles. I didn't like it very much, thought it was choppy, but it was still good fun. When Cata and I have to go into Lille on Tuesday for more paperwork, we might see Borat if we can find it in English. French movies are fun, but English movies are a nice change of pace.