Hola: Thanksgiving Break Events

Hey! I hope everyone had a really nice Thanksgiving! I was fortunate enough to have the day before and after Thanksgiving off from work, due to the fact that the other staff and I worked the previous weekend with kids and having a day off due to the school calendar.

This Thanksgiving, I signed up for the Buffalo Turkey Trot, which was an 8K race from North Buffalo to downtown. I started the race with Brittany (my roommate) and Andrea (a friend and coworker originally from Oregon), along with FOURTEEN THOUSAND PLUS other people!! Oh my goodness. There were so many people! And they all had different costumes, were different ages, and of different running abilities. It was so cool to see all of these people come together to support the Buffalo YMCA.

Brittany and Andrea SUPER pumped before the start of the race!

Running with the Crowd!

After finishing and about to celebrate! WOOT WOOT!

It felt so nice to run in the Turkey Trot. I think I will do it again next year. It was a great way to start Thanksgiving, before eating all of the delicious food. After getting back home, we all started making dishes for our Friendsgiving Feast we were having later on at a friend's house. It was a great way to spend Thanksgiving with people that you know and care about. Everyone from our program that was in Buffalo for the holidays and didn't go home with family celebrated together. It was EXTREMELY nice!

The next day, I ended up going to a concert that headlined Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness and New Politics. The Griswolds were there, and so was an artist called LOLO. I didn't get to hear much from LOLO, but the Griswolds were great. New Politics was super full of energy and all of their songs were catchy. The crowd was pumped up during their entire performance. The vocalist also made his way into the crowd several times too, which was really cool.

Andrew McMahon was really cool too. He had a grand piano up on stage (how does he travel with something so BIG?!?). The piano had some turf on the top of it, as well as a fishbowl with no fish. It was still very cool though. I really like him. Something I learned about him was that several years ago he was diagnosed with cancer. He now supports an organization called LOVE HOPE STRENGTH FOUNDATION, which helps people sign up for the bone marrow registry, to hopefully match a cancer patient with someone that can save their life. It is really amazing how many people they've matched together from having people take 3 minutes of their time to swab their cheeks. Here's the link to the foundation; http://lovehopestrength.org/

Anyways, I really enjoyed this concert, and met two great people (Kelly and Josh) who helped make my experience enjoyable by talking with me during the show. They were super nice, and I'm glad I was able to hang out with them during the concert!