Thanksgiving 2009

It's been a couple of weeks but Thanksgiving wore me out and this is the first chance I've had to try to get all caught up.

Our turkey was 13,02 kg (28.64 lbs.). By far the largest turkey I've ever cooked. I got it in the oven at 5:30 AM so that it could cook for the next eight hours.

The gang from Bratislava arrived on the 10:30 train and Steven & Michael's train from Vienna came in at 11:30. So in between cooking we had to pick everyone up from the main station and make additional runs to the grocery store. Thank goodness Janelle and Marcus were here to help with the food and running around with people.

This was my most international Thanksgiving ever. We had folks from the U.S., Domenica, Germany, Slovakia, France, Spain and Poland. Not quite sure how we didn't have any Czechs but at least it was hosted in the Czech Republic and there's always next year.


We went in a circle and everyone said what they were most thankful for and then we tore in to all of the food.

Thanks to multiple care packages we had a full American Thanksgiving dinner complete with turkey, cornbread dressing, mashed potatos, gravy, cranberry sauce, home made bread & honey butter, sweet potatos with marshmellow, green bean casserole, broccoli & cheese casserole, tuna pasta salad, wild rice, macaroni & cheese, deviled eggs, black-eyed peas, garden salad, spiced wine, eggnog, pumpkin pie, chocolate cake, and lemon cake.

It was really neat trying to explain what Thanksgiving is to all of our European friends. Several people told me that all they knew about Thanksgiving was what they had seen on episodes of Přátelé (Friends) on TV. In addition to new foods, we tried to introduce some other Thanksgiving traditions. Thanks to some creative downloading we had American football (not soccer) but that didn't go over so well because no one could understand it. However, everyone really enjoyed watching "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving".

After lots of food everyone was fat and happy. I got a kick when Monika said that now she understands what a "turkey coma" is. We later decided to walk off some of the food and headed in to the city center for the Christmas market. I'll post about the market later.

The market was fun and about half of the group headed back to Bratislava that night. The rest of us went back to my flat. Later, we all went out to a club where we ended up dancing until the wee hours. By the time I made it to sleep, I had been up for over 25 hours. The next day I felt as if I had been hit by a truck but it was so worth it. This had to be one of the all-time best Thanksgivings ever.

Lots more pictures are already up on Flickr. Just click on the photostream on the right hand side of the blog.