10 MINUTE American English Conversation | Learn American English | Go Natural English

Hey guys, how's it going? I'm Gabby from Go Natural English

and this is Shayna from EspressoEnglish.net.

You know, the holidays are coming up, in particular Thanksgiving

is coming up next week and we wanted to talk a little

bit about it. Hey Shayna, how's it going? Hey Gabby

I'm looking forward to the holidays. Yeah, me too.

What do you usually do for Thanksgiving?

I'm usually together with my family. My family is really close.

That's my parents, my brother, my grandparents and

various aunts and uncles and cousins. We all

just get along really well. Family time. There's no

conflicts. We love to laugh together, just hang out, eat

a lot. Yeah! What kinds of foods do you guys usually make? Well,

my grandmother is an excellent cook, so is my mom, so there's

always turkey. There's soup. There's salad.

There's ham. Various snack-type

things. I just eat it. I don't have to cook it.

That's good. I'm trying to remember what my mom used to make

when we had a big family celebration. It's been a while since we had a big

family celebration but when I was younger we used to all get together. Definitely turkey.

That's the thing you have to have. Unless you're vegetarian. Then you could do a

tofu-turkey. That's a thing. It is.

Cranberry sauce.

Mashed potatoes. Sweet potatoes. A lot of potatoes.

Starches. Green beans. Corn maybe.

I'm trying to think what else is traditional Thanksgiving food. Definitely

for desserts pumpkin pie. I love pumpkin pie.

A lot of food. When I think of Thanksgiving I think

of my stomach being very full to the point of

feeling like I'm going to burst. They call it a food coma.

You feel really sleepy like after you eat a really big meal.

You know, I'm not such a big sports person, but isn't there always

the football or something around Thanksgiving? Yeah, American

football. I think so. That's when the season kicks off or something.

Yeah. I just remember people eating Thanksgiving and then maybe

it wasn't even the same day but watching football around that time as well

so that's a big thing, American football. American tradition. Yeah.

Besides Thanksgiving, what other holidays do you like? You know,

I'll take any holiday. I love holidays. But I really love New Years

because I've started making it kind of

a period not only for celebration but also to

slow down at the end of the year and reflect

back on the year that has passed so quickly.

Make plans for the new year. So I really like that. I like that for

about a week in the US at least it just feels like everyone

slows down and relaxes and you can breathe and you can

just spend time with family and friends or maybe travel. A lot of people

travel for New Years. Actually last year I was in Mexico and the year

before, Brazil, and before that I was probably

in Japan, I want to say. I've traveled a lot for New Year's.

I just like the feeling that I get where I can stop

reflect and plan a new beginning, so to speak.

What about you? What do you look forward to?

I really like that period as well for exactly the reasons you said.

A chance to slow down, because I think we're always rushing around

in the US and especially as entrepreneurs

you know we have a lot of stuff to do. I love reflecting

as well. I write a summary of my year, like how it went.

New Year's itself we always spend with my best friend's family

in their beach house, but don't get too excited

because the beach house is in New Jersey so there is snow on the beach.

No swimming, no... No. Ok.

I've seen a guy in a wet suit braving the waves for surfing.

But it's cold. It's really cold. But we have

fun just enjoying each other's company.

Enjoying hopefully the end of the year that we lived well.

We accomplished some things and also looking forward to that new beginnings.

I love that. I'm really looking forward to it now. It's coming soon!

Are you spending New Year's in Brazil this year? I think so. I think

I'm going to go to Brazil, because, well for a few reasons. It's a lot warmer

than New York. I'm jealous. Yes, well New York City is an amazing place to be for New Year's.

You probably know the ball drops in Time's Square.

There's that. But I really

love the beach and I love warm weather and I think it will be fun

and it'll be fun to get away for a little bit and be in a different

environment where I can just pause and reflect.

Maybe do some journaling, reflecting on my year. When I'm in

New York I feel like there's always things I want to go out and do. Yes.

It'll be really nice. That's the plan anyway. What about you?

Where are you thinking of spending New Year's? You know, I'm honestly not even sure this year.

Plans are all up in the air. Maybe with your friends

in the beach house. Actually they're traveling right now, so they're

out of the country, so no luck there, but we'll figure out something.

Yeah, there's still time. We always do. I feel like in the US we don't have that many

holidays though. Maybe as some other countries. Yeah, I know. Well I think that

there's a few, very few big ones, where they're

federal nation-wide holidays where you know

that the bank's going to close and everybody stays,

well not everybody, some people have the day off, we'll say. What would that be?

New Years, Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving,

Christmas, New Year's, 4th of July,

we skip all those, January, February, March, April,

May. There might be one... isn't President's Day or

Martin Luther King Day some people celebrate. There's a lot of gray area.

It depends on your job and even the city you live in.

What's going to be a big holiday or not. Actually when I was living in Brazil

it was sometimes frustrating. I was living in Bahia, the state of Bahia in Brazil.

There were actually too many holidays. For example, Carnival would

be at least a week, maybe 10 days, and then there would be all sorts of days for

the Catholic saints, religious holidays. Things would close

and I would actually be frustrated. I mean I love celebration. I love all the different

kinds of celebration that you have, but sometimes it would be frustrating because I felt like

you said, the bank is closed. How do you get stuff done? I don't know.

It's interesting because here we don't really have saint's days. We

I mean I guess Christmas is a time, a

day about a week depending on where you work, but

they take that time off, but we don't really have the saint's days like you have in Brazil.

That's interesting. There's a lot of good holidays coming

up. That's why we call this period of time the holidays. We can

look forward to definitely having some holidays coming up.

Yeah. I would love to hear from actually people who are watching

what holidays you have in your country because there are some that

we don't even know about and we'd love to learn! If you have a holiday in your

home country that's unique or you just really enjoy then leave a comment!

Right? Yeah! And if I can ask another question,

I'm curious if you celebrate any American holidays. Do

you celebrate Thanksgiving? Do you celebrate Halloween in

your country? I would be interested to know both of these

things. Not the 4th of July, right? Because that's American independence.

Yeah, well, if you celebrate that, that's kind of interesting, but you probably don't.

Right? That's ok. Well, great. This is our third conversation

of four. Next week you can join

us again on Friday for another conversation. We're going to

be talking about a really special project that we've worked on together

three times now going into now what, almost

two years. No, about one year. This will be the one-year anniversary.

Wow, yeah! We're going to be talking about how

the English Power Pack came about, why we do it and just

having a conversation about what we're excited about in that. I'm

excited. Me too! Awesome. Awesome. If you want to learn more

about Shayna, she's at EspressoEnglish.net and I'm Gabby at

GoNaturalEnglish.com. We'll see you next week! See you! Bye!