Thanksgiving

So as you probably know, they don't exactly celebrate Thanksgiving over here. In fact, they really don't even understand it that well, and as it turns out it isn't the easiest holiday to explain. So, I had to work on Thursday and Friday, which was kinda weird. It was also probably the hardest week for us since all of our families were together and we were here by ourselves (we ate leftovers from Tuesday for dinner on Thursday).

We were able to get a pretty good lunch on Thanksgiving day. Jenna and Anne were able to meet me at Borough Market, which is close to my office. There is a little shop there that sells turkey sandwiches on a baguette. Even better, they serve turkey sandwiches with stuffing and cranberry sauce. It wasn't exactly the same as being at home, but it was a decent substitute considering our circumstances. We were also able to talk to both of our families so that helped.

We decided that we needed to have some semblance of a Thanksgiving dinner, so we offered to host at our flat and invited a few friends from the GEP program to come over on Saturday - 8 of us in total. This was great. We were in charge of the turkey and a few other minor sides, and then everyone else brought over all the other necessities.

We had a cheese and cracker tray for an appetizer (pretty popular over here). Then for dinner we had turkey, stuffing, corn, corn pudding, green beans, cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole, fruit salad, mashed potatoes, and gravy. Then for dessert we had pumpkin and apple pie (with homemade whipped cream), Hungarian teacake cookies, and pumpkin bread. The food was very comforting.

The interesting part was the seating plan. Of course, if you've seen the pictures of our flat you can guess that there isn't a lot of room. I measured it to just over 400 square feet. Also, we have only 4 chairs. As a solution, we had to move the kitchen table into the living room, and we brought in the patio table from outside. Luckily they were both about the same height, and we were able find a tablecloth that was big enough to cover both tables. We also brought in the patio chairs. Not exactly ideal but we cleaned them off pretty good and we thought it was better than having people on the couches trying to figure out how to deal with a loaded paper plate and cup and silverware and everything else.

Anyway, we had a pretty decent holiday. It wasn't the same as being at home with the family, but it was a very good alternative!