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I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving last week! It was a bit strange to be celebrating an American holiday in Italy, but my family made the trip here and we celebrated in Rome! The hotel we stayed at made a huge turkey and everything. I was pretty impressed. 

I spent some time in Milan, Florence, and Rome with my family. In Milan, we saw the Last Supper, the Milan Cathedral, and walked through the Galleria (where the high-end stores are).

In Florence, I was able to show them around where I have been living for the past few months. We all had dinner with my host mom one night and she fed us very well. Also, she doesn’t speak English and they don’t speak Italian.

They left on Saturday to go back home, so on Sunday I had the day to myself. I woke up early to catch the start of the annual Firenze Marathon. It was exciting and I had an incredible view of the Florence Cathedral and the Baptistry from where I was standing! 

Until next week…Ciao!

Stephanie

 

Hi everyone! Sorry for the delay in my post, my family was visiting! It was really nice to have them here, and I even got to do some things I hadn’t yet done in Spain! We went to the Alhambra, ate lots of good food, and went to some beautiful churches. We also saw a flamenco show, which I really liked! The dancers, singers, and musicians all have so much passion when they are performing! My family just left this morning, but I already miss them!

It was fun to have Thanksgiving here, even though it was very different than our usual routine. My program had a Thanksgiving dinner together in a restaurant. Although it wasn’t a traditional meal, it was very nice to spend time together. I definitely missed stuffing though (because it’s my favorite food)!

Last weekend, I got to go to Córdoba with my program. The mezquita there is AMAZING, it’s huge! It our final trip for the program, and it was nice to spend some time with friends!

Now I have five days of classes, and then I will be going on another trip (to London and Prague). It’s super hard to believe that I only have about 20ish days left here! It’s actually kind of terrifying, because I really love being here and I’ll definitely miss the friends that I’ve made.

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving and ate plenty of turkey for me!

Love,

Bix

This week was by far the most chaotic in China so far! It was my last week of classes so I had my final exam in Chinese, celebrated Thanksgiving with all my friends, and now I am traveling for the next week and a half. For Thanksgiving, I used my teacher’s toaster oven to bake an apple, blueberry, and pecan pie. We also had turkey and sweet potatoes, so it was an authentic Thanksgiving meal. I am now in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province. It is the 7th largest city in China with 14.43 million people and is known for its hot pot and Giant Panda research centers. Hot pot consists of a simmering metal pot of stock at the center of the dining table. While the hot pot is kept simmering, ingredients are placed into the pot and are cooked at the table. Typical hot pot dishes include thinly sliced meat, leaf vegetables, mushrooms, wontons, egg dumplings, and tofu. The giant panda’s diet is primarily herbivorous, consisting almost exclusively of bamboo. However, the giant panda still has the digestive system of a carnivore. Pandas are born with sterile intestines, and require bacteria obtained from their mother’s feces to digest vegetation. They eat about 25% of their body weight in bamboo per day! Gifts of giant pandas to American and Japanese zoos formed an important part of the diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1970s, as it marked some of the first cultural exchanges between the PRC and the West. This practice has been termed “panda diplomacy”. At the research center, they also had the unrelated Red Panda. The red panda is quite adaptable to living in captivity, and is common in zoos worldwide. The one we saw was so comfortable with humans that he climbed under the fence ran across the side walk and into the next captivity, not really sure if the researchers are aware its fencing needs to be reinforced. I am in Chengdu for a few more days before I head to Shanghai for a week!

在前！

Elizabeth

The toaster oven I used to bake pies.

Thanksgiving day pies!

Thanksgiving meal!

The river across from my hostel in Chengdu.

Eating some hot pot.

The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding

 

Pandas!

 

And more pandas..

 

Pandas eating bamboo.

 

More pandas eating bamboo.

        

A sleeping panda and an eating panda.

A selfie with a panda.

The red panda that escaped!