Thanksgiving and Snow!

First of all since I am bursting with excitement, there was actual snow today!!! Snow that stuck to the ground and I cannot get over how excited I am. This picture is once again the view from my room, you guys must be getting sick of it! Also I took it at night which is why it looks weird.

It started snowing while I was in the IND office picking up my resident permit with my friend Julia. Then when we walked outside it started snowing, which is the second time since Saturday. But to our delight we noticed the flakes sticking to the ground. By the time we were done with some other errands Utrecht was starting to take on a white and sparkly feel. Bikes parked all along the streets were covered in a soft dusting of snow, and so were the bike paths. By the time we got home to campus it looked adorable. It is blanketed in about an inch of snow all over. I have my fingers crossed that the snow keeps coming during the night so we can have a snowball fight tomorrow! However the first snow was just as exciting. After a wonderful night on Friday, I woke up Saturday to snow falling outside my window. I immediately jumped up and grabbed my sweatshirt to run outside. I ran across campus to my friend's unit and rang her doorbell. Skipping and jumping up and down with excitement. All my friends from the Netherlands and the East Coast are very amused by my continual excitement of the snow.

I just mentioned that Friday was wonderful, and I will now explain why. On Friday a few Americans and I decided to show our friends what American Thanksgiving is like, despite the fact that dinning hall provided one Wednesday. The thing was we had already planned this Thanksgiving. We asked people to bring food, that way we wouldn't have to do all the cooking. But no one really knew what to bring so two of us biked to the grocery store to get busy. I found an American store where I could get pumpkin pie filling and evaporated milk for pumpkin pie. We also got marshmallows for yams. In the end we made two chickens, roasted vegetables, yams with marshmallows, rice, carrots and we had bread and salad of course. The crust we bought for the pie came in square pieces, since it was not actually intended for pie. So I sort of quilted together a pie crust, inside a cake pan. In the end the pie was delicious and everyone, especially a few skeptical Brits, was in love with the pie. We all had pretty small slices because seventeen people ended up coming! It ended up including 5 Americans, 4 Dutch, 2 British, 1 Argentinean, 2 Italians, 1 Swede, 1 Australian and 1 Brazilian. Of course those are loose national descriptions because 2 of the Americans have European parents and one of the Dutch girls has American Parents. And the mixed nationality goes for a lot of the others too. It was just so fun to have a home cooked meal, to cook with other people while everyone else is sitting around chatting and after the dinner to just sit and talk over coffee for hours. I was really surprised by how nice the whole evening was. It was pretty unconventional though, seeing as how the Americans were outnumbered, we had no turkey and we made our pie in a cake pan. Oh also the pie was accompanied by stroopwafel ice-cream, just to Dutchify it a little bit.