Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving day. We, unfortunately, had a full day of classes, right up until 6:00, and then a mandatory lecture from 7:30 to 10:00 in the evening. So, needless to say, we had no Thanksgiving dinner. Very sad. Maria, however, cooked herself a nice Thanksgiving dinner on the window ledge - you can see that she is very thankful for all God's blessings.

In between our last class of the day and the lecture, we did squeeze in a quick dinner: meat loaf and mashed potatoes, followed by an apple dumpling with vanilla ice cream for Maria. The rest of us broke into the apple pie after the lecture.

Speaking of this lecture - it was the first one of the semester, unlike last year when they seemed to occur almost every other week - it was rather interesting. The speaker was the head of some institute for marriage and family. It's the group that organized the demonstration in front of parliament in September that we took part in. Anyways, his ideas for improving conditions for family life here are these: (1) lower the voting age to 0; (2) give pensions to children. In regards to the first, his idea is that parents can exercise their children's voting rights up to a certain age - I think it is 16 here - thus giving the most voting power to those with the biggest families. In regards to the second, his idea is that it is simply unjust to give 22% to retired people (who are not earning money, yet need to eat) and only 4% to children (who are not earning money, yet need to eat). Very interesting.