I lift up my eyes: Thoughts About Thanksgiving

Well, the past week has been very different than past Thanksgivings. First of all, I had class every day (sad), and what was worse was that I had to hear about everybody being with their families and eating tons of good food. It made me think about Thanksgiving and all the things I missed about it:
-being with family
-eating tons of good food
-being in NYC and waking up at 4 am to go watch the parade
-riding the subway because there was nothing else to do
-disturbing the NYC citizens and wreaking havoc

I did, however, get to experience a lot of typical Thanksgiving day occurences. Shannon and I hosted a Thanksgiving day meal at her apartment. We invited a mix of North Americans and internationals. All the US students were going to contribute food; however, almost all of them backed up either the day before or the day of! Needless to say, Shannon and I were super stressed that we wouldn't have enough food so, while Shannon stayed to work on the turkey and stuffing, I ran all over downtown Guanajuato buying potatoes, drinks, and vegetables (I will never forget the Spanish word for green beans now: ejotes.)

So, it wouldn't be Thanksgiving without all the last-minute stress and it wouldn't be Thanksgiving if something didn't happen with the turkey. In this case, we couldn't get it to cook. Ovens in Mexico are gas-operated and don't come with temperature gauges so we had absolutely no idea how hot the oven was. By the time everyone came the turkey still looked kind of raw in places. After much deliberation we decided to cut off the pieces that were mostly cooked and stick them in the microwave.

Despite the stress (and believe me, I laughed during it all because it was SO funny), everything turned out really well. I think everyone enjoyed it and it was really great to be able to celebrate the day in Mexico.