I'll Be Home For Christmas!!!!

This time next week, I will be headed home to the U.S. for Christmas with my family and best friends!!!!! SO EXCITED!!!! :-) :-) :-) So to celebrate, I have included a few pictures below from some of my favorite memories from previous Christmases...Enjoy! :-)

M&Ms, Iceskating, & Museums, Oh My!

Wow...so i can't believe that it's been over two weeks since I was last on here...time flies! Anyway, so what have I been up to? Well let's see..I went into London a few days before Thanksgiving and I got to go see the new 4 story M&M's store right in between Picadilly Circus & Leicester Square!!!It was pretty awesome! :-)

Probably my favorite part of the store!

Then, I went and took the tube over to the Tower of London and I got to go ice skating at the outdoor rink that they have set up out there in the moat!! Pretty epic! :-)

This sign is especially awesome b/c if you'll note the dates, you'll see that it opened on Mary's birthday and it ends on my birthday! :-)

I also celebrated my first Thanksgiving outside the U.S. I have to say that it was quite weird for me that everyone was just business as usual, but at the same time they were all really awesome about making the effort to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving! It was really sweet! All I can say is that I am really glad that I get to be home for Christmas, and I'm so glad that I was able to skype with my family for about an hour and a half that afternoon! I really have become such a big fan of technology since I moved over here! It has been such a blessing to have! I'm not sure how I would've survived otherwise! Anyway, below is a pic of the fam from my Thanksgiving skype call. :-)

Later after my skype call, we had a Greenhouse Thanksgiving dinner, which was actually quite the multi-cultural event!! We had 2 Americans, 2 Austrians, 2 Germans, 1 Spaniard, 1 Australian, 5 Brits, & 1 British Indian. :-) My assignment for the meal was to make an American dessert, so I made an apple pie that everyone but me seemed to be super impressed with...haha.(It was just store-bought crust with apples, cinnamon, & sugar inside.)

Then last week, having celebrated Thanksgiving to the best of my abilities, I moved on to fully embracing my favorite holiday season of all...Christmas!!! On Tuesday, I went into London armed with my Christmas music playlist on my mp3 player and a mission. The mission? Christmas shopping for the fam and friends! I also got to check out the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Natural History Museum, & Somerset House!

Inside the V&A looking out at the inner courtyard.

This was hanging up in the front lobby of the museum.

The Natural History Museum

Somerset House

I also finally got to take some awesome night shots of London down by the River Thames! :-)

That's St Paul's in the top left corner. :-)

The London Eye and Big Ben & Parliament! I love this pic sooo much! It turned out sooo good!

Then on Wednesday, I continued in the Christmas spirit by going Christmas tree shopping with Jaynie to get her tree. While there, I decided that I needed a little Christmas cheer at my house as well, so I got a tree as well! :-)

Mine & Jaynie's trees.

Here's a close-up of mine! :-)

Finally on Saturday, I attended a Secret Santa/Christmas dinner party and got to have my first experience with Christmas crackers. What is a Christmas cracker? Well they are super popular over here!

This is what they look like, You and another person each pull on an end and it makes a popping noise and one of the ends breaks off. Whoever ends up with the biggest part in their hand wins the stuff inside. Inside, you can find a paper crown, a joke, and a little prize/toy/trinket. It's pretty fun!

Chris, Jaynie, & I with our crowns. :-)

So that is just a few of the things that I have been up to for the past couple of weeks! I have also been up to plenty of youth stuff as well, but this post is crazy long already! LOL Come back a little later this week, and you'll be able to catch up on the ministry stuff that I have been up to as well! Love, Me! :-)

I Could Be Wrong Now, But I DON'T THINK SO!!!

Today is a very special day. :-) Why? Because it is one of my dearest friends birthday today!!! :-) So today, I wanted to dedicate this blog post to one of my best friends in the whole entire world, Mary Faxon. :-)

So here we are, The 25 Reasons Why Being Friends With Mary is Fantastically Awesome! :-)

1. She is a soul sister, a friend for life. She is one of those rare people where as soon as we met, we just clicked. We just get each other and I love that! I sometimes forget that we have only known each other a little over 3 years because we know each other so well, I feel like we've just been friends our whole lives. :-)
2. She is absolutely gorgeous inside and out! She just absolutely radiates God's love through every pore. :-)
3. She is exceedingly generous with her time, resources, money, etc. 
4. We always have tons of fun together. 
5. Watching Monk together and belting out the end of the theme song at the top of our lungs.
6. "I look like a moose." "But a very very cute moose. Make all the boy moooses go WAAAAHHHH!"
7. Her super encouraging text messages.
8. Her ranting text messages. ;-)
9. The fact that she is probably the only person outside my family that knows (and can sing with me) the Steve Green Hide 'Em in Your Heart songs. 
10. Her heart for serving and for ministry.
11. She is an integral part of our group of friends. :-)
12. "OH MY GOSH!!! THE TOMATO IS SOOO NOT IN THE SAUCE WITH THE WAITER!!! SO AWKWARD!!" ~ hahahahaa!
13. See below. ;-)

  

14.  Her passionate pursuit of God. 

15. Because she got me addicted to Tenth Avenue North. 

16. Our mutual love of Panera. 

17. "I feel like I just found out that my favorite love song was written about a sandwich."

18. Her stir-fry! Soo yummy!!! :-)

19. Our random late night talks in the bathroom while getting ready for bed at Lee.

20. Her constant support and prayers not just for me, but for everyone in her life.

21. How honest and open and vulnerable we can be with each other and know that the other person will take that gift and treasure it and pray for us.

22. The fact that we know all of each other's crap and it just makes our friendship that much stronger.

23. Her love of strawberry pie and impatience for it to be done when it is cooking in the oven.

24. Her disgust of, and refusal to watch me take my contacts in and out because she can't stand to see me touching my eye. haha. 

25.Because she once told me that one of the things that she missed most about living with me was the noise that I make when I rub my nose. haha!

Roomies Forever! :-)

I Am Understood??

Hello, allow me to introduce myself. I am Miss Understood, or at least that is who I feel like I am over here half the time. haha. I always claimed that if I ever moved to another country it would be one where they spoke the same language as me. Well I lied. I have moved to another country and while are able to communicate quite well for the most part, there are times where I am convinced that we are speaking two completely different languages. The interesting part of this is that I have no problem picking up on the British slang, it's the words that are the same but mean two completely different things that I have the most problems with. Therefore, I have decided to dedicate this blog post to talking about several of the differences that I have come upon while living over here, and I will do it in a list form because as we all know, I like lists. :-)

• If you want to refer to the pair of pants that you are wearing, you must say trousers b/c pants means underwear. (I am always forgetting this one and getting laughed at for it.)
• A purse is a women's wallet, while a wallet is a man's wallet. 
• Also what we call a purse, they call a handbag.
• Gas station is a petrol station or garage, so therefore gas is instead called petrol. Garage also is pronounced completely differently as well.
• it is pound and pence, not dollar and cent, most people abbreviate pence by just saying 'p'.
• Instead of saying 20 bucks, you say 20 quid. 
• 5 pounds is a fiver, and 10 pounds is a tenner.
• What we call college is referred to as Uni. (short for university, college over here is something completely different.)
• In school, it is not 3rd grade, but year 3, but actually it would be year 4 because they start counting a year ahead of us in school.
• Pudding is any type of dessert and they don't have what we know as pudding at all over here. 
• Cookies are biscuits, and  potato chips are crisps, while what we know as french fries are chips, unless you are ordering from McDonald's and then they are french fries. 
• Ground beef is called mince, and there are mince pies as well, but mince pies don't actually have any meat in them, instead they have raisins

While there are plenty of others, I believe that that is enough for now, hopefully y'all feel much educated about how to speak like a Brit. haha! I hope that you all have a wonderful weekend!

Frozen Corn Freakout

Wow, what  a crazy past week and a half or so it has been! And it hasn't really been one thing in particular, but really just the combination of everything together. I do believe that the so-called honeymoon period is over! Now don't get me wrong, I am still very much enjoying being here, but there are certain things (cultural differences) that i find are now annoying and frustrating me more than they have for the past two or so months. I have to confess, I had bit of a flip-out last weekend when Maggie and Anne (two of the German girls on the Greenhouse team with me) were over for dinner. I was trying to cook some frozen corn and not only do I find the nutrition facts here practically impossible to read, but the whole British method of cooking is completely different as well!! While we in the U.S. use cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons, over here it's all grams and mL and whatnot, so it's almost like reading a foreign language! Anyway, so I just lost it and started going off on this ethnocentric rant about how the British can't do anything right and they can't cook right, and the Americans are always right and do things better and why can't the rest of the world just do things the right (i.e. American) way??? Anne and Maggie just looked at me like I had absolutely lost my mind! haha. So then on Monday at cluster (our group meeting time), we were talking about our weekends and I mentioned this and I turned to Anne afterwards (hoping to illustrate that I was not only one struggling with ethnocentrism) and said, "Anne, don't you just get frustrated sometimes and wish that everyone would just do things the same way they do in Germany?" Her response? "No. I respect the British pple and their culture and their way of doing things." Huh...so much for me proving my point about everyone thinking that culture is best. Oh well. It seems the longer that I am here, the more I realize how really cocky and ethnocentric we really are as Americans. I mean for heavens sake we stole the UK's national anthem and put our own words to it to make it into our own patriotic song, among other things!!! (It's My Country Tis of Thee, in case you were wondering.) So anyway, I am obviously feeling conflicting emotions when it comes to be an American in the UK. On one hand, I love where I am from, on the other hand, I can't help but feel completely ashamed of how ridiculous we must seem to the world sometimes. So yeah, if y'all could be just be praying for me that I could continue to be able to adjust to living here and that I would be culturally sensitive to the differences between being an American and being a European and that I would (hopefully) offend as little people as possible with my unintentional cultural blunders in the process. Thanks so much for your prayers and support! :-)

Greetings from Across the Pond! :-)

     Well here we are...Welcome! Thanks for taking the time to come hop across the pond and visit me for a few minutes! (Well at least cyberspace visit me...haha) Well, I have been living here in the UK for about nine and a half weeks now, and wow, what an adventure it has been!! There is just so much that I would love to share with y'all, I just don't even know where to begin! I guess I am going to have to pace myself...Ok, first let me try and explain what it is that I am doing over here and then I'll give you a brief summary of what has been happening for the past two months before I begin to delve deep into anything.

Us in Northern Ireland

     I am here participating in the Greenhouse program, which is an intensive 11 month discipleship/leadership training/youthwork program that is run by International Christian Youthworks (ICY), which is a part of Reign Youth Ministries. There is a team of 8 of us who are at 2 different sites, one in Bicester (about 30 mins from Oxford), and one in Sutton (about 30 mins from London). Of these 8 people, we have me (the only native English speaker), 2 Austrians, 4 Germans, and 1 Spaniard. We are definitely quite the multicultural bunch, that is for sure. :-) 
Our time is divided 3 ways. We work 1/3 time in a local church placement, 1/3 time in the schools with Sutton Schoolswork, and 1/3 time meeting together and being discipled as a team, as well as individual mentoring. We also have a 5 day long conference every 6-8 weeks where we are able to all meet up together along with all the other ICY people. It's great fun! We stay at this cool conference center called The Mill up in the Cotswolds.

So, now that you have a general idea of what I am doing, let me tell you a little more about I specifically have been up to over the past few weeks since I got here. :-)
September:
  Week One (2nd-9th)- Flew into Heathrow on Friday, proceeded to meet LOTS of new people over the next 4 days, tried to get over jet lag, felt very overwhelmed, went to the first ICY conference, made an 8 minute $16 phone call home, got horribly ill, and got to go experience the wonderful world of NHS (the national healthcare service)  in hopes that they could tell me why the world would not stop spinning around me. :-(
Week 2 (10th-16th)- Armed with the medicine from the doctor, I rested up and after staying a few days with a fantastic American family (who is also here with ICY), I was somewhat able to move around without feeling like I was living on a tilt-a-whirl, although I did look like I was a bit tipsy when I walked. haha. I also moved into that house that I would stay in for the next month. :-) We also started our Greenhouse meetings together as well. And I learned how to take the train to London and back, as well as touring Tower Bridge. :-)
Week 3 (17th-23rd)- More meetings, visited the Tower of London (and the Crown Jewels), got a UK bank account, worked on getting more settled in, church, etc.
Week 4 (24th-30th)- Greenhouse meetings, went to Buckingham Palace and got to see the dress from the Royal Wedding back in April!
October:
  Week 5 (1st-7th)- my first British wedding! Also, on October 1st, it was 81 degrees (F) out, which was the hottest that it had been on that day since 1904!!
Week 6 (8th-14th)- Meetings, schoolswork, getting into a routine, moved to the house where I will be living for the rest of the time that I am here. :-)
Week 7 (15th-21st)- Meetings, leave for Challenge 72 in Ireland (more on that in another post)
Week 8 (22nd-28th)- Challenge 72 and 2nd ICY Conference
November:
Week 9 (29th-4th)- Came back from Conference, got caught up on stuff here, met with Lesley (lead youth person at St Mary's) to discuss ideas and the future for the Lounge (our youth meetings),etc
Week 10 (5th-11th)- Meetings, visited the National Gallery, started this blog. :-)