Chiyo: Turkey Day in London

Unlike everyone else back in the states who is on Thanksgiving Break, my life stayed the same here in London since they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Although we don’t get off school or internships, I can’t really complain considering we had a 10 day Fall Break at the end of October, so it’s a fair trade off. My voice sounded horrid this morning from being sick, and I was not ready to take on the day. 

We got our final case study in my int’l mktg class, which I’m super excited about because it is about Ferrari. And I absolutely LOVE cars. We did a small group exercise like we normally do every week, and this time it was a little different because it was about pricing strategy and after we gave what we thought were the correct multiple choice answers, our prof gave us the author’s answers and we were given a score from 1-5. Well…our team apparently is not very good at pricing strategy because we came in dead last. After class got out i had a field trip for my pop culture class in Camden Town, so I headed out of school and onto the tube for the gajillionth time.

Today our field trip was a trip to the Jewish Museum, which was surprisingly a fun field trip. We had a de-briefing by this cute old man who volunteers at the museum once a week, and he was so cheeky and lovely. My favorite section of the museum had to of been the memorial to the holocaust, because it was different from every other museum I have met on the holocaust, and way different from the concentration camp I visited when I was just 15 years old. This memorial stood out because it focused on one survivor from the holocaust, who is from Britain and after he was liberated, spent the rest of his life giving speeches about what happened during those awful years. It was such a moving section of the museum, and they have a video running of the man telling his story. I think the one thing that I will take away with me from that memorial was how after his wife, him, and his son got shipped off to the first of many concentration camps, 15 minutes later the papers that proved they were British citizens and which would have kept them safe from being deported had arrived. Fifteen minutes. That just breaks my heart, because his little boy and wife were taken to the gas chambers, and he didn’t find this out until he was liberated. 

I was looking forward to CAPA Thanksgiving, and even though I knew it would not even come close to what it would have been like back home in the states, it was still really great of them to put on a dinner for all of us. At my table, it was all Newman kids, and we went around the table and said what we were thankful for. It was then that I really missed being home with my family, where I would be cooking up a storm with my mom and sister. In the hotel where we had dinner though, they were showing the Packer game which I thought was awesome. I couldn’t really tell if the food was any good or not to be honest, because I have lost all sense of taste and smell due to being sick. I did however, take full advantage of eating lots and lots of mashed potatoes, turkey, and cranberry sauce. It may not have been the Thanksgiving that I am used to, but I will always remember “Turkey Day” in London 🙂

My school put decorations up for us 🙂