Happy Thanksgiving!

Idiot of the week:

Lady: Do you have Mackintosh toffee?
Me: No, Sorry, i've never heard of it!
Lady: You've NEVER heard of it?? It IS Canadian!
Me: You're in the United Kingdom.
Lady: Oh.

So I experienced my first American Thanksgiving this year. We were crazy busy at work as it's a public holiday for Americans and alot of them spend it at Disney! The week before, the Rose and Crown Pub in the UK Pavilion put on an early Thanksgiving dinner for us. People brought in homemade food so we had lots of traditional British stuff like trifle and cottage pie, it was delicious and as usual I ate far too much! The evening before thanksgiving one of the other housing complexs held a free thanksgiving dinner for us which wasn't as nice but we don't make enough money to say no to free food! Lastly on Thanksgiving while we were at work our managers brought in a traditional thanksgiving dinner for us which included turkey, vegetables and potatoes etc.

The day after Thanksgiving the Americans have Black Friday which is basically when the sales start like our January sales. The malls open at around 4am and the outlets open at midnight. Never ones to miss out on sales us girls were queueing outside Forever 21 at 11.30pm waiting for the shops to open! The crowds were crazy, I've never seen anything like it and if you turned up in pajamas you got free gifts! (We didn't do that!) We shopped until around 3am although I didn't spend that much, I bought 4 tops in Forever 21 for $20 and had to queue to pay for at least an hour! After all that shopping added to the fact that the weather had dropped to below freezing we were rather hungry so the girls and I ended up in Ihop at 4am eating pancakes! It was possibly the stupidest thing I could have done as I had work at 10.30am so I ended up having around three hours sleep! Let me tell you I struggled through work the next day! Lol

Obviously with all that free food and 4am pancakes I feel disgusting! I've put on far too much weight since I got here and if I carry on i'm going to be huge by the time I get home! I'm realistic though, I'm living in the States and there's not a chance in hell i'm going to diet! So my only other option is to exercise! I've started going to the gym everyday and i'm determined to keep it up so you don't all think i've turned into an elephant when I get home!

While we're on the subject of food I have to tell you about the most amazing dessert I have ever had. Me and 4 of my friends went to Beaches and Cream on our day off. It's an American style diner at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resort and they do the biggest dessert I have ever seen called the 'Kitchen Sink' (because it includes everything but the kitchen sink!) The dessert includes chocolate, mint choc chip and strawberry ice cream, oreos, coconut cake, strawberries, bananas, cherries, cream and that's the stuff I can remember! lol. When they bring the Kitchen Sink out the lights in the diner flash and they sing a song, it's hilarious! The five of us managed to get through the whole thing in what we thought was an impressive 20 minutes. However the waitress told us the fastest time was a young lad who finished it off in 9 minutes on his own!

After Thanksgiving it has become even more Christmassy in Epcot, there are more decorations and there is a Father Christmas or Santa Claus in every pavilion which tell guests their countries traditions at christmas. Our Father Christams wears the traditional green and is abit scary actually but I think it's cute! However it is really surreal trying to feel festive in the sunshine. I have my advent calendar to count down but it doesn't feel quite right and it certainly doesn't feel like 4 weeks until christmas when i'm wearing short sleeves and eating ice cream! I hope I will feel more festive when my family arrive in a few weeks! The weather is very unpredictable though, although I say it's warm, we have odd days where the temperature completely drops and it's freezing and days like today where it has been really miserable and hasn't stopped raining all day! Proper English weather!

It was Beth's birthday this weekend and unfortunately for her she was working until 10pm so we bought her a cake and balloon and left it outside her apartment when she returned home! As she was working on her birthday she decided to celebrate it over the next two days. On the sunday lots of us went to Golden Corral for a birthday breakfast, then that afternoon, Rachel, Beth and I checked into Disney's Coronado Springs Resort. When we got there we took a look around the resort which was so pretty, however we were so knackered by the evening we chilled out in the room watching the huge TV and eating pizza! It was nice just to spend a night out of the Commons! We ate breakfast in the resort the next morning and then we checked out and headed to Hollywood Studios. After a few hours there we took the boat across to Epcot, we had dinner at the Rose and Crown which was fun! They got us a table by the lagoon so we could see the fireworks while we had dinner, they also gave us free starters! We had a roast dinner which was nice and we saw the extra christmas fireworks which are amazing! Lastly the servers all came out and sang 'Happy Birthday' to Beth which embarassed her but was fun!

It's going to be a couple of sad weeks for us merchies. This week we're losing Rachel and Anth as their program has come to an end now. We had their last night at Bennigans and we did their last song, there were alot of tears. Beth and I are driving Rach to the airport on sunday which is going to be horrible saying goodbye, we have become really good friends. Next week we have three other cast members leaving, they are all self terming- It means alot of hours for those of us left over christmas! Eek!