This week is brought to you by the letter S

This week:

SNOW

STUDY

SOUP

STRASBOURG

Snow: I mentioned that it started snowing on Thanksgiving evening. It snowed off and on during Black Friday, all the live-long glorious Saturday, again Sunday night, and off and on again for the rest of the week. Today is the first full day of somewhat sunshine we've had in almost two weeks. And the snow is supposed to return tomorrow. I don't mind. I absolutely love it. I feel like I live in a Thomas Kinkade painting.

One of the things about the snow that has been really fun for me is watching all my Arab classmates react to it. They are all from desert countries where there is never snow, and this is their first time to see it. Some of them like it, some of them don't. A few of the girls don't own any boots at all, and continue to walk around in ballerina flats with no socks, even though their feet are freezing. I watched one girl (with boots) delightfully walk very deliberately where there were no footprints so she could make her own. Another day, about a week into the snow, I heard shrieking laughter at the top of the stairs on my way home. As I climbed up, I saw one girl covered in snow and digging it out of her purse.

"Did you fall?" I asked concernedly.

"No!" And she pointed.

Another one of the girls (one of the ones who refuses to don boots) had bombarded her with a snowball and had another raised, ready to fire away. The girl who'd been hit had apparently never thought about a snowball fight in her life and just wasn't sure whether to fight back, to be mad, or to laugh. So far, none of them have made a snowman. I, however, might make one tomorrow...

Study: One of the reasons there has been no blogging since Thanksgiving is due to how hard I've been studying. My teachers are laying it on thick and I feel like I can barely keep up. So this back-posting 4 posts on a Saturday thing might end up being a regular deal. I go to class 25 hours a week, help CSI and Lydia study a few more hours a week, and then still try to pack in 10 more hours of my own studying in on top of all that. EEK.

Soup: Thursday nights have become soup & study nights for me and CSI. (I have a feeling that Lydia might start joining us in January.) I make a soup in the crockpot during lunch, let it cook all afternoon, and then we enjoy that evening for dinner while we drill each other on vocab words. Teacher has said that we (my class) need to be learning 10 new words a day. So I make vocab flash cards each day during lunch, review them each evening, and try to be ready on Thursday to go over the old 50 from the previous week plus the new 50 from this week. Helping CSI with hers is a good review for me, and we're hoping that her helping me will let some of mine seep into her head as well. This week's soup: Butternut Squash with chicken.

Strasbourg: Every month the school offers a field trip for a good price. Last month, they went to Avignon, Aix, and Marseille...where I'm going for Christmas and have been a million times already. I passed. But this month's trip was to Strasbourg, where I've never been but always wanted to go. And for just 20 euros! That included a boat tour through the city as well as the round trip bus ticket. CSI and I had a great time...albeit a COLD one. It was -9 degrees Celcius, which calculates to about 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and snowing on top of all that. But we didn't care, because we were there to see the Christmas markets and the cold and snow made it seem even more like Christmas!

More pictures of Strasbourg are the photoblog. Click HERE to see Strasbourg, HERE to see the Christmas market and HERE to see terrible photos from the great boat tour.