Christmas where it isn’t celebrated

First of all I would like to apologize for not having blogged in so long. My computer stopped working and I just started using my phone instead. So no you’re not catching up on posts you missed I am. Blogger is just sneaky and I can set the date posted for any day I want. Anyway, me and the other exchange students any my school asked for both Christmas and Christmas Eve off. Rotary was going to take us somewhere on Christmas but we didn’t want to go to school on Christmas Eve either. For the others, Christmas Eve is a bigger deal then Christmas because that’s when they have the big dinner and open presents and Christmas Day they go to church. Our teacher was surprisingly lenient and let us have both days off. When Christmas Eve rolled around Elena, Heloisa, and I had pulled some strings and managed to arrange a sleepover at Elena’s. That turned out to be a very good idea. We started out by making food. Elena, making two traditional Lithuanian dishes, me making cupcakes for my upcoming secret Santa with my class, and Heloisa helping in anyway she could.  After making the food we watched a few movies. We did face masks and chatted. Whenever one of us would have a moment and be like “oh my god it’s Christmas Eve” the others would say something along the lines of, “at lest we’re together.” And however cheesy that may sound it was true because that was really hard. So after midnight I gave them my gifts. I gave them both a pair of chopsticks is shown that class that we made from Lake Michigan and an orange Chocolate bar. Heloisa gave me stickers for my water bottle and an orange bottle of white out because I’m always asking to use hers. I fell sleep on what was now, technically, Christmas morning all right. We are all fine even though it was her first Christmas away from our families.  Well I woke up I took a bus to Banqiao and met up with all the other exchange students. Much to our surprise, Rotary took us on a hike!  No one wanted to be on a hike on a hike on Christmas so everyone was complaining a bit. Although it was a quite beautiful trail and about halfway through there was a man playing the saxophone (on a hiking trail!?!)   It was Christmas and, damn it, this was not Christmasy! After hiking they took us to a mall. By then I had realized that the point of this trip was not to make up for missing Christmas it was to keep our minds off of it. It kind of worked. For some reason I found this day more mentally taxing then most of the others. So much so that I think I actually fell asleep at the coffee house we went to. After the mall we went to a party. It was a very nice party. There was lots of tasty food, a dance floor, couches, but it was pretty mellow because of the mood everyone was in, Near the end of the party we did a secret Santa gift exchange. I had a Brazilian girl who I had never talked to because she doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Portuguese. She liked my gift though! Much to my surprise, Elena had me. She got me a sticker for my water bottle, nice face masks, and cute socks. To wrap up, as far as Christmas away from home can go, this was a pretty good one.