Eve of Thanksgiving

Well it is the Eve of Thanksgiving and I'm for seeing tomorrow to be a rather difficult day for some of us. For others though it will be a wonderful Thanksgiving that they won't forget for awhile. You see some people have been lucky enough to have family and friends visit them over this semester. And some particularly lucky people have friends, family, fiance's, girlfriends etc visiting this week. I'm very excited for all of them. It's so amazing that their loved ones are able to come over here and spend this time with them. However for the rest of us I think it almost makes it harder because we see everyone else having people here for this day. They get to spend time with someone they love and although it's not nearly the same as being with your entire family for Thanksgiving it is at least something. I will definitely be missing my family tomorrow. I think we are going to try and skype, after the Packer game of course, but I'm almost thinking that might be worse than not seeing them at all. I don't know, perhaps it will all be fine and we'll have a nice chat and it will be wonderful. Or I will be a bloody mess after seeing them all together and me ... well here. It will just be different.

On a completely different note I only have 3 1/2 weeks left and I don't want to leave. Although I miss my family and friends like crazy, this place has been the best thing I have ever done. And I've gotten to see so much of Wales and so much outside of Wales. For example this afternoon I got back from a few day holiday to The Netherlands! 2 of my friends and I headed over toward Amsterdam on Monday and stayed with some people from Central College who are doing the Leiden programme and got to explore a bit of Leiden and a bit of Amsterdam. Both cities are absolutely amazing!! They are so gorgeous with the canals and the rivers and all of the buildings!! Oh I absolutely loved it!! While we were in Amsterdam we also got to go to the Van Gogh Museum and see some of his amazing masterpieces! Unfortunately Starry Night wasn't there, it's at a show in New York City actually but we got to see the Sunflowers and Iris and so many other amazing paintings/drawings/sketchings. We also went to the Anne Frank House which was so amazing. It was a very emotional experience to see the house that she and her family hid from the Nazi's in. We got to walk through the bookcase that closed off the building to their Secret Annex. And there were pages from her actual diary, in her actual hand writing on display. There were videos from people who knew the family or knew Anne and also a video of her father who survived The Holocaust. That video was one of the most emotional parts of the museum because he talked about how he had never known that Anne had all of these thoughts and feelings toward what was going on until he read her diary. He spoke about how he didn't really know his own daughter and that he believes that parents don't really truly know their children. I thought that was an extremely powerful statement but I also believe it to be rather true. Its very true that our parents don't really know exactly who we are especially as we grow older. Not that it's bad and I don't know that there is anyway to change that but we are all slightly different around our parents than we are around our friends and it's not that we are lying to either party it is just that we are different. However it is fairly easy to incorporate how you are around your parents when you are with your friends, but to do the opposite is darn near impossible. I just thought it was a very interesting thought that Otto Frank had. I really loved Amsterdam. There was definitely stuff there that I didn't get to see on this trip and I would really like to go back some day and see more of the city. One day was just not nearly enough time. Although we were dead tired when we got back to Leiden last night and when we were leaving this morning. But I do think it was the best mini trip I have been on in this whole semester!