I Just Had To Smile :) Blog 20

France and America are not the same, haha.  I mean, I've known that for a long time but when you live somewhere for long enough everything starts to feel normal, then all the sudden something weird happens and you remember that you are living in FRANCE!

So today I went to church and was so excited because I understood the WHOLE sermon, yay!  Then afterwards, the pastor ended by saying "bonne aperitif"  which is like saying "enjoy your appetizers..." Which confused me a little bit, but as always, I just went with it.  The aperitif in France comes before meals and is usually finger food and a drink...so when people started walking around with trays of finger foods and drinks I understood.  The church was having a little bit of fellowship time, and taking the first course of the traditional French meal, then everyone could go home and eat lunch.  So I grabbed a plastic cup of white grape juice and an egg and ham finger sandwich.  But as I took a sip, I quickly realized it wasn't white grape juice, lol!

And there we have it.  Someone had handed me a glass of alcohol, in CHURCH!  Haha, at first I was shocked, then I decided it was extremely amusing.  My church back home doesn't even serve wine for communion, and the thought of handing out wine or champagne or whatever it was, in the church, just to drink, was just beyond my imagination!  And that is how I know I'm living in Europe.  Wow.  Life is just different over here I guess.  It's all how you view things I suppose.

So then we all returned home, and I looked in the kitchen and there was a pumpkin pie!  And a huge thing of corn, sweet potatoes, stuffing, and a big cooked bird (a chicken, there aren't turkeys in France til christmas time.)  The sights and smells were extremely familiar, and it felt a lot like, THANKSGIVING!  Yeah, my awesome host mom had made thanksgiving dinner for me :)  I feel so special :) So we ate, and I prayed for the meal, and I was in the process of thanking God life, family, food, and for protecting the early colonists and such, and blessing America, and I realized I should probably pray for France too haha.  So I added a blessing for the Europeans :)  I shared with my host family a lot of my traditions for Thanksgiving and over all, it was a GREAT meal :) A nice mix of French (we started with pate) and American culture :)

So I grinned a lot today, just thought I'd share it all with you :)