A Marathon Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for you, all of my friends and supporters who have encouraged me in this endeavor! I realize that this post is a little past Thanksgiving, but I had a marathon weekend and needed some time to recover. Of course, I had to work on Thanksgiving day because the weekend here runs Friday-Saturday. However, since it's the first evening of the weekend, you can imagine a fun-filled Thankful time! I started out with my two friends Michael and Lois and went to their house and we had a nice time with Charles from the choir (he's the man who owns a diatonic set of C Major hand bells.) You can say that Michael and Lois are like my "parents" in Christ. Anyway, we had an absolutely splendid time! I got to hear crazy stories, and Charles told us about the time in the 1970s when he bought a car in the UK and drove it ALL THE WAY TO IRAN. NO JOKE!

After this lovely little treat (I ate so much that my stomach actually started to hurt!), Charles drove me back home and I went over to my friends Regina and Sunell's flat to join in decorating their Christmas tree! You can see me there with Jena (another RCA volunteer) and my friend Susan's sister (I can't tell her and her other sister apart, sorry!). Overall that was a great time and we came home around 2am. Since I had promised myself that I would call all of my family since it was Thanksgiving, I stayed up until about 4:45am, when the morning call to prayer started. Usually, I wake up around that time to go jogging. You can imagine my surprise when I was going to bed to the call to prayer, instead of waking up to it!

Saturday was my second Thanksgiving dinner with more of my RCA/school community. We definitely had some good food there too! And, might I add, that I had lots of left-over cranberry salad, so I have been eating that to my heart's content over the last few days. Oh rapture, oh bliss! Here, you can see our beautifully decorated table and our smiling faces! This is Amy, Jen, and me.

To top off this fabulous night, I attended a benefit piano recital for UNICEF. Sid, a high school student that attends the NEC, is a 15 year old piano prodigy and he gave a Sr. recital/graduate level piano recital! I was in awe of his talent and loved the pieces that he chose. (His teacher is Russian, so there were lots of Eastern Europeans on the program: Rachmaninoff, Khachaturian, Dvorak, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky...I know I'm spelling this all wrong!) Anyway, Symphonetters, I all thought of you because he played one of the Khachaturian that we did on our European Tour! The evening started off with a young lady telling us a story that I wanted to relay to you:

Imagine that all of the world's population is represented by 10 children sitting at the table. Three of those children would have plates heaping with so much food that they could never even possibly finish, much less enjoy. Two of those children would scavenge what they could from the first three children. Three children would be hungry, and the final two children would not survive. At the end of a weekend where I completely gorged myself on Thanksgiving food, I did feel slightly guilty hearing this story. But I also took away from this story that it is important to not only share our blessings that God has bestowed on us, but also to be thankful for them. I am very thankful for the blessings that God has placed in my life, especially being so far away! Happy Thanksgiving!