Thanksgiving

Leading up to Thanksgiving week, there was a lot of anticipation boiling in the apartment, both for a couple peoples' boyfriends to come, as well as for our big Thanksgiving dinner, mm!

In the beginning of the week, I did a bunch of exploring on my own, going for long walks around. We pretty much only had class on Wednesday this week, too, since Thursday was the art history final, but our class went on a final walking tour of St. Peter's Basilica since we were to be given a take-home test.

That Thanksgiving was the most ridiculous Thanksgiving I've ever had.. so much happened, and it was all pretty crazy. We all came home and finished up preparations for the big feast.. setting the table, picking up last minute things at the grocery store, etc..

As things were finishing in the oven, we made some nice hand turkeys to keep ourselves from hovering in the kitchen too much.. we ended up with great turkeys, like a pelican turkey, harry potter turkey, pope turkey, football turkey, italian turkey, vespa turkey.

Finally, then, dinner was ready.. we had to extend the table with the desk in our apartment, since we had ten people instead of the usual seven, but it worked out alright. For dinner, we had: box stuffing (thanks to Meghann's sister and boyfriend), pasta salad, mashed potatoes, quiche, rotisserie chicken (just from the pizza place down the street, this was one thing we didn't want to attempt in that oven...), brown sugar carrots, biscuits, and bread. To accompany this, Meghann's boyfriend had picked up a huge jug of really fresh wine from one of the markets a little bit south of our apartment. It was a lot of wine, even if we did have 10 people working on it... Jamie was showing us her fantastic chugging skills, but her glass was too full when she decided to do this, which resulted in streams of wine coming out her nose. The chair that belongs to the desk also became trouble, since it pulls apart a little bit to fold up for storage, but if you bump the side of it wrong, it falls apart a little bit... so at some point, Erin's boyfriend fell through the chair, providing us with much more entertainment at dinner. For dessert, we had both apple pie and sweet potato pie, along with some mulled wine.. the sweet potato pie was REALLY good.

After dinner, we took some "family portraits," that got progressively more and more outlandish. We also did a white elephant gift exchange, with everyone giving something they had, could make, or could get for a euro or less. There were some pretty interesting gifts given, like cobblestones, paper cranes, cards, birds made out of a carrot, popsicle sticks, etc.

Then came the first of the really ridiculous part: drama. Erin and her boyfriend were fighting, and it got really weird.. there was some yelling and door slamming and involving everyone else. Then, Erin stormed out of the apartment. I ended up following her and going for a long walk with her since we figured she probably shouldn't have been alone and out at night.. hoping it would calm her down and things would be better upon our return. And, it was.. for about two minutes, then there was more yelling and door slamming.

That's when we decided it would be a great time for us to go out.. so we headed up to Trastevere, to a little bar/coffeeshop-type place where they have little chocolatey liquor shots in little glasses made out of chocolate and whipped cream. They were quite the adventure, and I'm pretty sure I got whipped cream everywhere. We then headed down to the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere and were hanging out there for a while, when we spotted our friend JJ and his dad, so were talking to them for a while.

Then, there was this rowdy group of Italian women, three of them roughly 30 or 35 or so, and one much older, like 50 or 60, maybe. All the younger ones were incredibly trashed.. one of them ran up to the fountain and started theatrically yelling.. we gathered that she was maybe cursing death upon us or something similar.. There was a lot of crazy yelling and gesturing, and it was for the most part pretty amusing. JJ's dad decided this would be an excellent thing to videotape. The older lady came up behind him and was telling him to put it on youtube and that this crazy lady was some famous Italian author or something like that. Then, one of the other ladies came up to JJ and was telling him that she would sue him if he posted the video, and kept following them around, harassing him. We decided it was time to leave when we felt a big splash on our backs, to look up and realize one of the other women at the top of the fountain had decided it would be fun to take a huge gulp of wine, then spew it all over us.

By this time, of course, it was late, so the trams had stopped running and we had a long walk home...

Definitely quite the interesting evening.

Thanksgiving weekend, most of my roommates went to Greece. I had thought about going with them, but I had ended up deciding against it since I had to decide when we got back from the north field trip, so I was kind of sick of traveling at that point. I had mixed feelings about it, I kind of wish I would have gone, but I did have a relaxing weekend and I think I would have been really stressed out when I got back since we had a project due the day after they got back (which I hadn't started until the beginning of that weekend... ).