My Oh My, How Time Flies.

I'm sitting here at my computer in my office staring at the calendar on the wall when I realize tomorrow is the last day of November. It feels like last week was the beginning of November, not four weeks ago. Time flies when you're having fun.

Earlier this week, Melissa and I decided to make sugar cookies - simply because we wanted to cook something. She got a cookie recipe and she told me she had these ninja cookie cutters and I was like "Awesome!". Anyhow. It was only after we put two cups of sugar and FIVE cups of flour into the mixing bowl that we realized how many cookies we were making.

"Melissa, do you realize the serving size on your recipe is 60 cookies?"
"What?! No it's not."

Hiyah! My decorated ninja cookies!

Serving size: 60 cookies. It felt like we made a hundred, and maybe we did. We had ninja cookies, heart cookies, circle cookies, flower shaped cookies, etc etc you get the point. We even made two ginormous cookies and made a small christmas tree cookie. Goodness so many cookies.

Poor, poor headless ninja.

But I honestly think we had more fun playing ninja than anything. I tried to teach Melissa how to do a flying jump kick. I could barely remember - it's been years since I've done taekwondo and my skills are rusty. We posed with our ninjas. Someone bit the head off one of our ninjas. That was sad. Poor ninja. Anyway, it was just great to spend time with Melissa and the other Marines because they're such good people and so welcoming and they make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Or maybe that was just the cookies talking.

Clearly, I fail at running jump side kicks. 

The Christmas Market started last weekend, and everyone is so excited, especially me! It doesn't feel right without snow on the ground, but supposedly that's coming soon enough. If you ask me, it can't come soon enough because if it did, it would have been here a month ago. Anyhoo, the Christmas Market is basically a bunch of wooden stalls set up in the Town Square in Old Town and they have all this wintery food, Glogg (hot wine, alcoholic and non-alcoholic), wintery stuff like hats and mittens, and of course Christmas-y stuff like gifts, ornaments, etc. It's pretty incredible and they even have performances every day at certain times. When I went last Sunday with Melissa, I was pleasantly surprised to see these performers dancing to what I was pretty sure was Arabic music! And maybe Turkish music as well. It gives the feel of diversity that is extremely hard to come by here in Estonia.

Posing by the fish tank. Oh yeahhhhh.

 Last weekend I also got my first pedicure ever! It wasn't your average pedicure - my toes and toenails aren't super pretty now. I basically stuck my feet in water for 30 minutes and let these fish eat the dead skin off my feet. It was probably the strangest experience of my life, but definitely not the worst! At first I couldn't control myself - I'm pretty ticklish when it comes to my feet. But then I kind of got used to it but honestly, it felt like my feet were asleep or something when they really weren't. At the end of my 30 min, the fish didn't want to let go. It was only when my feet were actually emerging from the water when they thought "Shit I should probably let go of this yummy foot if I want to survive." All-in-all, a rather interesting experience.

Itty bitty fishies eating my feet!

Finally, yesterday was Thanksgiving. I spent it with the Marines and with Embassy folks at the Ambassador's residence (delicous turkey dinner, thank you!), so even though it was my first Thanksgiving on my own without family, I was by no means alone. It feels so strange that it is Thanksgiving already, and that the new year is just around the corner; and with the new year comes my departure from Estonia. Best not talk about that yet - I'm not ready to leave or become emotional or any nonsense like that. So i'll just stick with Happy Thanksgiving!