November, November

Hello, it is me again!

I am still feeling very comfortable and very happy here! It couldn't be better!

Many things happened in the past few weeks and I hope I won't forget anything here :D

On November 5th my liaison took me the first time as a tourist to the Cope Cod. We went to a town called Chatham. We went first to eat lunch and then we went to the beach. The beach was beautiful! The setting with the very pretty beach and the lighthouse made me feel like I'm in a movie once again.
After a nice walk at the beach we went back to the car and we wondered why the people all are watching something in the sea with their binoculars. They were watching whales!!!! I've never seen whales in my entire life before and I saw that day about 10 whales as close as many people who were there have never seen them before!! I was so happy and it made me so happy to watch them how they were playing.
After the whale watching we went to the center of the town with many pretty houses. There were many little shops with souvenirs and clothes. I have now some whale tail earrings and I bought some very good candy from an old fashioned candy shop that produced all the candy right in that store.
The day was really awesome!

Then on November 8th, the election day, I woke up early in the morning to meet an AFS volunteer with some exchange students. The AFS volunteer owns a limousine company and now you can guess what happened! To celebrate the birthday of an Italian exchange student, we went with a limousine to Rhode Island to a Thai restaurant, after that to a very impressive mansion of very rich Americans in New Port. After the museum - mansion visit, we went to the cliffs of New Port and did the cliff walk right above where the waves break. That was gorgeous too! After an already long, but amazing day, we went to an Italian restaurant and ate pizza. After the pizza there was of course a cake for my good Italian friend Mavi. We ate a lot that day and when I got home I could almost explode hoe much I ate, but it was just amazing!
Since it was election day that we had the day off and could do this excursion.

The elections:
I was very exhausted from the things I did all day long on the November 8th, but I still watched a bit of the election, which means a TV channel where the results where slowly showing up.
Trump was there already ahead at that point by more than everybody I know expected.
I didn't know the result until the next morning. The first thing I did on the November 9th was looking up who won the election.
The tension at home and in public, before and after the election was clearly noticeable. People would stand with flags on bridges that go over that highways and show the people the poster for their candidate. We also had many phone calls from people who wanted to convince her to vote for either Trump or Clinton. On the streets in Duxbury and other town you could see posters from the candidates and you could see many stickers on the cars.
Also in the school there were many big discussions and in my US history class we talked a lot about it too.
The whole elections were very interesting for me and a very good experience!

On the November 11th it was Veterans Day which means that I hadn't go to school that day. I went with two girls, Megan and Sarah, who live here and went on an exchange last year, with Jazmin from Paraguay and her host sister and Gilly from Italy to Boston. We planned to go to a museum but that didn't work out because one girl couldn't come, but it was really fun also without a real plan. We went to New Bury Street where very nice and sometimes very expensive shops are and also to the Harvard University campus. And of course it was a lot of fun again ;)

On November 13th I was invited to an international AFS dinner about 45min away from my town. The exchange student from the South-East district of the Massachusetts Bay area, were invited from an AFS club of a school in old Rochester. All the exchange students brought some food of their home countries, which was pretty awesome. I met again many new people and I saw all the exchange students from my area again, which was really nice too. We talked, laughed and ate a lot :)

On November 14th, on Monday, I went to a town called Scituate.There I met some other exchange students again, at a middle school. We presented or home countries to 8th grades and missed a day of school again. This week was the International Education Week. I did two more presentations in my history and Spanish class. In the presentations in my classes I talked more about doing an exchange, to convince more people to do an exchange and to host students.

The weekend after on the November 19th and 20th, I went to Easton to see my friend from Italy. I went with her to the homecoming dance at her school. It was a very interesting experience. That is all I can say. They played rap all evening long, which is not my favorite music and everybody danced a bit different than I am used to.
Mavi and I had a really nice weekend!

On November 24 it was Thanksgiving! A very big thing here in the USA. My host parents's children from NY state, from San Francisco and the daughter who lives very close to us came. My host mom had only days before a knee surgery which meant that we had to celebrate Thanksgiving in our house but my host mom wasn't able to cook. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, "my bread" (Zopf) and for dessert apple pie, lemon meringue pie and cinnamon rolls. The whole meal was just amazing! Everything was very delicious and we had a lot of fun.
After the dinner we played together board games which was very fun too!
Everybody told me that Thanksgiving will be a lot of fun and it definitely a was.
On Friday right after Thanksgiving is the black Friday,which a day when all the stores open around midnight and they have a lot of their products on big sales.
As I think everybody knows I love go shopping, so of course I went black Friday shopping too. I went with the son-in-law of my host parents at 23:00 in the evening on the 24th to a store who sells TV's and much more electronically stuff. We were waiting for two hours in front of the store to get a TV and a speaker. After that we went to two more stores and bought some other not really important thing. I was at home at about 3:30 in the morning. It was a crazy American experience hahahaha.

I am really sorry it took me so long, but I wanted to take a bit more time to go over it and write everything exciting down what happened and since I want you to know as much as possible from my exchange I thought you can wait a little longer too.

Best wishes from Duxbury and the ocean,
Nadia

PS: Also check out my Facebook for more pictures :)