Happy Thanksgiving!

Everytime I sit down at an internet café to write down interesting things I´ve done, I always think, "Oh, shoot, I didn´t do anything interesting this week." Then, usually a light bulb comes right about now and this week it was, "Oh yeah, yesterday was Thanksgiving! AND the last day of training!!" So that´s kind of exciting, yes?
So, here's the scoop about my first pilgrim-oriented holiday celebrated out of the states. First of all, just to state the obvious, no one here knows or cares about thanksgiving. Anyway, because of the proximity of the swearing-in ceremony and obligitory celebration event for Santa E. host families with Thanksgiving, we decided to combine the two events and make a potluck of Thanksgiving foods and invite our host families. Aaah, nothing like a 200+ person celebration of thanksgiving in Spanish with lots of people who don't like this crazy (really expensive and really really hard to find) gringo food. Don't want to sound negative though because it was fabulous. Deep fried turkeys were made, mashed potatoes (made the way that I wanted to make them), stuffing, real salad (like, not with cooked for an hour vegetables), sweet potatoes, and the most spectacular desserts: pumpkin cake, pecan pie, oreo truffles, brownies, cookies, apple pie, sweet potato pie, um, yummy. We mostly served everything but the volunteers in the food room vetoed some of the desserts from leaving for public consumption. :)
We recognized the staff with flowers and gave flowers to our families. Some more musically inlcined volunteers (definitely not me) played guitar, drums, or sang in a little concert in the beginning of the evening. There was also a slide show of pictures with volunteers and their host families. I´m not sure if any of this stuff I´m writing is interesting or not.
I think my family was fully surprised at how much I ate. I finished my plate and then finished my host sister, Gabi´s plate as well. She did not like the salad or the sweet potato casserole. Aka - who doesn´t have more room for that? Sidenote: there was NO rice.
This morning I packed up all my stuff and it is now hanging out at the training center until after the swearing-in ceremony. Eeek! I'm getting sworn-in! No longer a PCT, now I´m officially a PCV. Never knew it took so much time and effort to be called a volunteer. Usually that merely entails showing up.



Peace Corps Quote of the week: "A Peace Corps Volunteer sees the glass with water, sees that its half full, and then takes a bath with the water."