Daniel Ferrante

It started off simply enough. Five of us assistants from America (Sunshine, PGOAT, Moses, YAEB and myself) decided we should have a Thanksgiving dinner here in Dijon. We’d invite a few friends and the other American assistants, do our best to imitate an American Thanksgiving dinner and try to stave off the home sickness.

At some point it got out of control. Maybe it was when I met the Alaskan girl in Nice and invited her to stay with me for TG week. (She accepted, and really would something like that happen if I weren’t living abroad?). Maybe it’s the fact that every week I have new people for my other friends to meet. Perhaps it was YAEB falling for the French bloke with the British accent? Or the neighbourliness of the French students next door to my dorm? Or Mathieu and his crazy international mixers? Or the Aussies (who don’t have a koala bear).

Who knows? And who cares? All I care about is that the five of us cooked dinner for 23 people, complete with stuffing, gravy and desserts.

In attendance:

Us 5 assistants from the US
The 3 French students that live in the dorms near me
The 1 Alaskan (who left her polar bear at home)
2 Aussies (who brought baked wombat)
The French version of Fabio (who thinks I’m gay, but then who doesn’t)
3 girls from Poland
A brit (who is still pissed off over losing the colonies - and we made NO mention of Tea, Boston or taxiation that night)
The German assistant from Austria (not Australia - which is the closest you can get to hell w/o being burned)
Several other American assistants
And good lord, I’ve gone cross-eyed from trying to remember everyone.

Needless to say, the turn out was fabulous. The food was incredible (thanks mostly to PGOAT coming to my rescue) and everyone had a great time.

After dinner, we put on some music and taught people the Tush Push and various other dances, including a few Irish jigs.

As we left the dining hall and headed back to our dorm buildings, we saw that it had snowed! A gorgeous one inch layer of fresh powder had blanketd all of Dijon. We took to snowball fights, snow angels and just screaming and running around in the snow. It was incredible. It was beautiful.

It was perfect.