Happy Christmas, Merry New Year...Cheers to 007!

Ok, so I have been a bit of a slacker on the blog. And to be honest I feel like so much has gone on that I dont even know where to begin. Lets see I finally experienced my first proper football match...BOING BOING BAGGIES! In other words I am becoming a dedicated fan to the West Bromwich Albions (after all I am their good luck charm they won that game 5-nil) who are the local team here, a part of the English Chamionship league, and please dont expect me to explain how the football leagues work. This new support for the Baggies has led to a new project for the YMCA - a relationship with the West Bromwich YMCA and the West Bromwhich Albions. This will mean I will use my power of persusion and work on getting the Albions to do some marketing promotions for our Healthy Living Centre. And apparently this afternoon I will have a football traning session with one of the Albion coaches and our male residents(I think they are tying to turn me into a footballer).

Now onto a very Happy Christmas in West Brom. I was ever so lucky to have my wonderful mum come and spend Christmas with me; and honestly it was awesome. It did make me long for home even more having her here, but I couldnt even begin to imagine what life would have been like spending Christmas without family. I do wish that all three of us had been together for Christmas, but hey you live and learn.

This Christmas was very different from any other, and not becuase I wasn't at home in Delaware but because, this year Christmas wasn't about me. My mum and I took the opportunity to give back this holiday sesason, and actually spent Christmas day making a real Christmas dinner for the residents at the YM who were staying here for the holidays. My mum, along with some other staff memembers, and myself cooked a full English Christmas meal down to mince pies and served it to about 10 residents. It really was an awesome experience, and loads of fun. It was nice to be able to share this day of family in a nontradtional way. But I guess I have been doing a lof of that since I have been here. After dinner was all done around 5ish we did our own Christmas which was very simple...and spent the rest of the day making phone calls home, speaking to my Baba (dad), friends, and relatives and of course spending time together.

On Boxing day we woke up bright and early and were off to London to spend some time with relatives, do a bit of sightseeing, and of course some shopping.

Now onto New Years! My New Years was def fun, not what I expected but fun none the less. I went to Edinburgh, Scotland for Hogmanay, which is the largest new years celebration in the UK. Its basically three days of partying, carnival type stuff, and a huge street party on new year's eve, where they expected about 500,000 folks to come in from all over the world. We arrived in lovely Scotland on Saturday night, had a great night, which involved lots of wine and sushi. And then we went to bed a bit early to be ready for NYE.

Needless to say when we woke up it was POURING DOWN RAIN, but no worries its Scotland and the UK after all and that's what it does, it rains. So we made our way outside, around 2ish and we saw a beautiful sun set(yes the sun starts setting by like half 2 because by half 3 its completely dark outside). So we are like no worries, no rain, just windy. We came home and began to pregame, get ready to pop over to our mate Mark's house and head to the party. Well when we arrived at Mark's we found out they had CANCELLED the street party. And we were like what do we do now? So we decided to go to the city centre anyway...well we and thousands of others did the same thing. WE are all loving life, everyone was in a good mood and we went to Rose street which is where there are a ton of pubs, we did some pub hopping, stopping to do a bit of dancing and of course lots and lots of kissing on the cheeks with random blokes. Made some Aussie friends too. And at Midnight we found ourselves with god knows how many others on a street intersection. Well none of us knew what time midnight really was (in our various native time zones) so we all started looking at our watches, counting down at different times, and it was actually quite funny. Until we saw fireworks (now it wasn't as huge as the fireworks display was supposed to be, apparently they have been known to spend millions of pounds on fireworks for NYE). But everyone started popping open champagne, beer, and whatever ever else they could spray on the crowd, I was drenched in alcohol, and it was great! It was an amazing sight. It wasn't as crazy as I heard it was going to be, but hey I got to bring in 2007 in Scotland.

So here is to a great '007! Can you tell I absolutely loved the new James Bond movie and I am now dedicating my whole year in its honour.
May all people be at peace today and each day :-).