Dezember 2014 – Anneke's new adventure

First of December!!! My mom sent me a German advent calender, Thank you!!!

We made it to December!!! I think I mentioned it already many times before but I just LOVE Christmas and everything related to it. You can only imagine how excited I am these days. Everything looks so festive and luckily Americans started Christmas season already before Thanksgiving by decorating and celebrating some Christmas events. But before Christmas officially starts I would like to share my Thanksgiving experience 2014!

Thanksgiving in the USA always happens the fourth Thursday of November. This year it happened to be the 27th of November. My host sisters were already on Thanksgiving break the whole week and everyone seemed to be preparing for the big day, the days before Thanksgiving. I was lucky that Thursday was a holiday because that day is always the busiest for me at college.
Since my host family’s family lives all over the USA and mostly in California, it was just us 5 to celebrate the typical American holiday. Though we were kindly invited by friends of the family. My host family’s task was only to bring pies and the other family prepared everything else. Of course I also wanted to contribute something and decided to bake a German apple pie.
Thursday noon everyone dressed up nicely and festive and we left at around 1 o’clock to Sherwood, a city 30 minutes away from where I live. The whole neighborhood and street already smelled like amazing food is waiting. We had a warm welcome by Scott, Maera and their small daughters Milli-May and Katie-Beth.

All the girls together

My complete host family: Susan, Patrick, Tori and Emily

After playing and goofing around with the girls, it was time to finally eat the Thanksgiving dinner and I really didn’t get disappointed!!! A super tender turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cream corn, sweet potatoes with a marshmallow topping, potato salad, cranberry sauce, rolls and gravy! Yummy Yummy Yummy!!! Having this delicious dinner and lovely conversations made me feel very welcomed, comfortable and a tiny bit American as well. We spent the rest of the day watching football, chatting and eating more. Of course after the huge turkey dinner I also had to try all the pies: pumpkin pie, pecan pie, chocolate pudding pie, apple pie and a peach pie with ice cream and whipped cream on the side. 20687 calories later, I was so full, but happy! We left in the evening and just hang out and enjoyed the holiday.

Cutting the turkey

ALL THE FOOD!!! – We should start celevrating Thanksgiving in Germany as well!

Me: ‘Tori, pull an excited face!’

Myself, Scott and Patrick

The sweet girlies

My host sisters

The Friday after Thanksgiving is known as ‘Black Friday’ which basically means: Shop until you drop! All stores have amazing deals and you can get especially electronic goods for a very good price. I didn’t really need anything and so I didn’t do any bargain hunting.
Actually most shops already opened in the evening of Thanksgiving and then again really early on Friday. I just made my way to the shops at around 10 am to see the crowds and maybe also finding a good deal. The craziness though was already over. Most deals were sold out within minutes after the opening. It was still very busy and after strolling through Walmart, Target, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom and a huge mall with all other well known stores I was just exhausted. In the end I ‘just’ got two pair of pants and a t-shirt. Compared to others who could barely walk because of all the bags they were carrying, I was very modest.

American Thanksgiving and Black Friday: check! Been there, seen that! (Actually my second Thanksgiving. Back in 2008 I had a similar experience in Missouri)

Another part of the CBYX program which I am participating in, is next to studying and working also volunteering for at least 40 hours during the year. It took me quite a while to decide on where I wanted to help but after a little research, I found a food pantry which is fairly close to where I live.
Maybe some of you remember that I helped out at a food pantry at my very first stop of the homestay tour in Rock Falls, IL. I really enjoyed it back then and thought I could give it another try. Tracy, the coordinator, gave me a warm welcome, showed me around, introduced me to my co-workers and explained my tasks.

Ready to work!

The ‘Tualatin School Food Pantry’ is an initiative to help families of the communities of Tualatin, West Linn and Lake Oswego. You only need to be a resident from one of these towns and you have the right to benefit from the food pantry. You don’t need any other social or financial proof. It is located on the ground of the Rolling Hills Church and also connected to this non-denominational church. Private persons donate food as well as big grocery stores like New Seasons, Safeway, Market of Choice and also Starbucks donates for example pastry.

The procedure is fairly easy. People are allowed to shop once a month. Depending on how big the families are they get a certain amount of food.
My task is to help, support and supervise the customers. I have a chart where it says how many units they get of what food. The food pantry almost looks like a normal grocery store and is divided into different sections: dairy, meat, canned vegetables and fruits, produce, bread, drinks, sweets, pasta, cereal and so on. I accompany every family through the ‘store’ and tell them for every section how much they get of it.

Shopping carts

That’s how the aisles look like

Meat and Milk

Veggies!

Dairy!

A family of 4 persons for example gets 5 units of canned vegetables. We always have a variety and so they can choose if they prefer green beans, tomatoes, peas, corn or mixed vegetables. So basically it is regulated how much they get but they can choose what kind of a certain category. I think the concept is very logical and it really seems to work great.

My chart where I can look up everything

My co-workers are all really helpful and warm-hearted and supported me in the beginning a lot. I’m working there now since mid October always on Mondays and Fridays. I really enjoy helping for a good cause. For me it was definitely the right choice to do my volunteer work at the food pantry. The week before Thanksgiving was crazy though because they gave out turkeys and many families combined it with their monthly shopping. This meant lots and lots of work for us! Usually there are around 40 – 50 families a day but the days before Thanksgiving we helped around 120 families!

One Sunday in November it was time to discover the Columbia River Gorge and Mount Hood. As I mentioned in my last blog post I always enjoyed seeing the mountain but I actually never went to discover the area east of Portland. That Sunday was fairly cold and rainy but well I didn’t bother. I have a little travel book of Oregon and Washington and there I found this tour: from Portland, along Columbia River, around Mount Hood and back to Portland. The book also pointed out a few points of interest along the way. One stop was the Multnomah Waterfalls. Apparently they are the fourth highest waterfalls in the USA. It was indeed really impressive! Around this area one can find many smaller and bigger waterfalls between all the high trees. What a natural beauty!

Columbia River

Multnomah Falls, I was there!

A ‘smaller’ waterfall just next to the historic highway 30

The historic highway 30 is a winding road and gave scenic views over Columbia River. It ends in the Mount Hood Valley which is fertile plains and known for it’s many apple and pear trees. I bet this is beautiful in spring when everything is blooming, but that day it was just rainy and grey. I was very impressed that just a few miles outside of Portland, the landscape and the atmosphere changed so drastically. Small towns, farms, silence, emptiness and just nature. As following the winding street, it rained and rained and rained and snowed, and… hold on, what? YES, it started snowing! I probably should have expected that, but to be honest I was very surprised and unprepared! I really wasn’t sure what I should do in that moment. The road was all of a sudden covered in snow, I didn’t have any snow chains and it was super slippery plus I am not used to driving in a hilly snowy area. Sounds promising, right?
Since the road went up so slowly and slightly; I didn’t even notice that we were that high and close to the mountain! Afterwards I looked it up and the street was actually over 1.400 m high at that point. With this knowledge now, I am not really surprised that it started snowing. In that moment it was very scary on the one hand and at the same time it was a winter wonderland. Although I really dislike the winter, the picture of snow covered trees and the whole nature dipped into white, was just beautiful. With Christmas music on the radio it could have been an idyllic moment but as I said I was rather scared and concentrated to navigate my car on the road and not driving it into a ditch.

(Of course I would love showing you some photos of the snow but after the described situation, I didn’t think about taking out my camera… Next time for sure!)

In November my host sister Tori turned 10 years old and she celebrated with all her friends at our house with a sleep-over party. All the girls had a fabulous time and so did I. They played different games, had lots of candy, chips, popcorn, sweet drinks, stayed up late, listened and sang along loudly to every song and Tori received many nice gifts. Watching the girls made me miss being 10 a tiny bit hahaha. It was just so much fun and I just wanted to share this lovely day! (where I didn’t get too much sleep since the 8 10-year old girls stayed just next to my room and giggled the whole night)

Coloring

Dancing

Woop Woop Parteeey!

Red velvet cake with lots of chocolate frosting, topped with a million m&m’s and surrounded by hundreds kitkats

Sleep over

As the year comes closer to an end, also my college semester is about to finish up. This means again: I need to start working soon! To be precise: in January. I was always quite chilled about it, but when November started I realized that I should better start looking for a job because I didn’t want to bother with it during Christmas season. I noticed really soon though that finding a job in the tourism industry in Portland is fairly difficult. No well-known or big tour operators, airlines or other tourism companies have offices in Portland. Even though I am trained to work in a hotel it was not my preference to work there. But since I knew I had to find something, I decided not to be picky and just apply everywhere.
For two weeks, I was digging through Craigslist where you can find many job offers, applied at every hotel around where I live and even handed in some resumes at local coffee shops and Starbucks. All the research, introducing, writing cover letters and no promising answers have been quite a tough time and I doubted that I would find anything decent.
In the end I had a few interviews and can proudly announce that I found a job!!! I am happy as I could be! The company that is hiring me didn’t even have an ad somewhere but I just walked in anyway and introduced myself. We got along very well immediately and agreed fast. I’m going to start working in January for a travel agency in Lake Oswego, just 20 minutes by car from my house. I am very curious about the new job and I can’t wait to start with this new challenge.

I will end my blog post with first impressions of christmassy Oregon. I got to see the local tree lightning of West Linn with Santa’s arrival and a small festive festival called ‘Light the Park’. I also baked Christmas cookies on the first ‘Advent’ with my host sisters Tori and Emily. All this makes me even more excited for the coziest season of the year and I can’t wait for the next weeks! Happy Holiday Season!
Anneke