Thanksgiving and such

As a follow up to my previous post, Thank you to those who voted. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough and Loving Vs. Virginia didn’t make it into the top 6. Sadness.

I haven’t posted in a while, I know. Not much has been going on I guess. It has snowed more. Yesterday in particular. We have several inches on the ground now. And since the temps don’t really get above freezing anymore, it pretty much just sticks around on the ground indefinitely. Sam is nearing the home stretch of classes for the semester. He’s getting antsy. Ready to have a reprieve. December 25th is not a holiday here, so Sam will be in classes that day. Most Russians don’t make much of Christmas, but rather celebrate New Years. For those who do celebrate Christmas, it is celebrated by the Orthodox calendar – January 7th. So, the first week in January will be a holiday week , and then exams begin. How quickly Sam clears his exams will determine how much of a break he has between semesters.

Sam and I did celebrate Thanksgiving. We invited a few good friends to come share dinner with us. I cooked, and had a great time baking things and being able to play host. I baked chicken in a homemade honey-mustard sauce (no turkey available and if there was, probably way too expensive) mashed potatoes, corn, stuffing, baked pineapple, deviled eggs, and apple pie (couldn’t find the spices needed for pumpkin pie!) For dinner there were 5 of us – Sam and myself, Deepthi and Mokshaa from India, and Faisal (Sam’s roommate from his 1st and 2nd year) who is from Jordan. Everybody was kind of tentative at first. Mokshaa told me, “You have to go first to show us what to do. We don’t know how to eat Thanksgiving food.” Sam laughed and said, “We use forks.” Everyone laughed a lot at that. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with Indian food and eating, Indians typically use their hand to mash together their rice and curry or whatever sauce and eat by hand.) The “Thanksgiving food” was of a different variety than most of our guests we accustomed to. Faisal, when putting food on his plate, took the tiniest portions of food and went to sit down at the table. I looked at him and said, “You want to make sure you like it first, don’t you?” He laughed and admitted, “Yes!” Well, thankfully it went over well, and very quickly he was back at the serving table filling up the plate. Everyone filled up and in typical Thanksgiving fashion was very full by the end of the meal. Since Thanksgiving is an American holiday, I was asked to share the story of holiday and its history. It was a very enjoyable evening and I had a great time sharing my favorite holiday with my few friends here.

You can see pics from our Thanksgiving celebration to the right in the slideshow, or you can check them out by following the "My Photos" link to my Flickr site.

I hope you are staying warm! Or to those of you in the southern hempisphere...i hope YOU are staying cool!