Thanksgiving


Thanksgiving this year was an exercise in adaptively. We could not find any turkeys at the grocery stores, so a friend suggested going to a butcher shop. Coincidently, one of the best butcher shops is right down the street from our new apartment. I had to ask if they had turkeys, because I could not see any in the cases. The person I asked at first could not figure out what I wanted. Another person at the counter figured out what I wanted after I described a turkey as a “big chicken”. He ducked in the back room and rustled in the deep freezer for about three minutes. He finally produced an extremely frozen turkey that was just the size I needed.
Another item we could not find was stuffing, or even breadcrumbs. This solution was simple enough; I simply made it from scratch. The only problem I had was buying the correct spices. Before I went to the store I looked up the Norwegian word for each spice necessary to make stuffing. As soon as I had the translations, I was able to buy all the spices I needed at the grocery store.
The only item I was unable to locate was pumpkin pie mix, or pumpkins at all. The only why to solve this problem was to not make pumpkin pie. I simply made apple pie and banana bread (each from scratch) for the dessert.
We invited four friends to dinner. Simon who is German, Marius who is Norwegian, Harold who is German, and his girlfriend Septop who is from Turkey. It was every ones first “Thanksgiving” but they all had an idea of what a Thanksgiving dinner was from TV and movies. They were intrigued by the turkey, and were impressed that “Americans actually ate apple pie”. After dessert we cleared the table and played a board game together. The game “Ticket to Ride” was very appropriate because the purpose of the game is to make trains form different US cities. We had great conversations about our cultures and current events.