The importance of Expat Thanksgiving

I'll admit that even by lax Andalucian standards (with the strange exception of the bus schedule, I've found the southern Spanish stereotype regarding tardiness to be fairly accurate), this entry comes a bit late. It's even later than it might have been, because once we passed the New Year I had serious misgivings about posting at all. But who knows where I might be or what I might be thinking about Thanksgiving next year? I'd like to take a "better late than never, better properly written than slapdash" philosophy to this blog. So: onward!

I've spent a few holidays abroad in my time-- July 4th in China (2007), Greece (2009), or Spain (2012). Christmas in Spain (2009, 2010), England (2011), and Ireland (2012.) My birthday in Italy (2009 and 2012) and Spain/Germany (2011.) Thanksgiving in France (2009) and Spain (2011)-- and again this year. Each celebration abroad mixes the familiar and the new in an exciting way, and I've deeply enjoyed sharing elements of my favorite traditions (whether they be Independence Day s'mores or latkes on Hannukah) with new friends that have already taught me a great deal.

French Thanksgiving in 2009 was a magical affair: it took place in a borrowed apartment in Normandy stocked full of couchsurfers from Cherbourg and stuffed to the gills with instant mashed potatoes, chicken from the village rotisserie, and homemade Norman apple pie (more like a tart by American standards.) Last year's Palentino Thanksgiving was equally full of newness and excitement, as well as a dear friend who came to visit. She brought with her canned cranberry sauce, stuffing mix, and more instant mashed potatoes-- as well as a contagious love for the holiday that added spark to the proceedings.

Then, in what seemed like a blink, November came around again, bringing with it my third Thanksgiving outside US borders. For 2012, I arranged an elaborate meal with Hannah, a new American friend in Linares. We invited several Spanish (and two Polish) friends, who in turn invited their friends, and in the end we had a total of 12 people sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner! It was a little bit of an overwhelming prospect, but with determination and a dollop of team work we were able to produce a menu that included: an apple pie, two pumpkin pies, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, stuffing, graving, salad, and cranberry sauce (my pride and joy, concocted using reconstituted dried cranberries and--incredibly deliciously--an entire pomegranate.)

The results of a great deal of hard work! (Mostly Hannah's)

The day itself was full of happy, crowded chaos, exactly as a Thanksgiving should be. The invited throng trickled in starting around 3 PM--for once Spanish dining times coincided with American traditions-- just as Hannah and I were putting the finishing touches on the menu. The pies, which we had baked the previous night, were set to cool on the porch; the chickens were just coming out of the oven. We enlisted the cheerfully-complaining help of Maria and Jose to carve them and Polish Zeb to put some elbow grease into the mashed potatoes. Drinks were poured, places were set, the menu was translated among three languages, and we all sat down to a lip-smacking, multilingual, multicultural feast. (Of course, beforehand, Hannah and I insisted on following the time-honored tradition of saying something you're thankful for.)

The assembled Thanksgiving crew, before the meal

A complete Thanksgiving plate--even with cranberry sauce!

The meal was a total success. The conversation was peppered with compliments on the food (most of which our friends had never tried before) and a butchered/simplified version of the Thanksgiving story; the pumpkin pie, gravy, and cranberry sauce were particular hits. After a solid afternoon of eating and cleaning up, I even had a chance to take the customary post-Thanksgiving nap (here again Spanish and American traditions intersected.) I drowsed happily, thinking of people at home doing the same.

And here's the thing: it wasn't just people at home. In the coming days I saw pictures of expat friends all over the world celebrating. One in Beijing posted photos of a complicated Western-style spread; an acquaintance working for an NGO in Sudan took to his blog to describe in detail the effort of procuring a scrawny African chicken, getting it butchered, and preparing it for his feast. The next day, another NGO-worker, this one on the island of East Timor, posted pictures on Facebook of herself sharing a cooked, honeyed squash with a neighbor. There were no turkeys to be found, she said-- this was the closest she could approximate. Other friends throughout Spain sent anecdotes about the best way to make cranberry sauce (that's where I got the tip about using dried cranberries) or adventures adapting to Basque palates. It seemed like every expat I knew was going to extraordinary lengths to celebrate Thanksgiving, and it got me thinking--why are we so compelled to bring these American customs abroad, and what so is so specifically powerful about Thanksgiving?

I believe our expat Thanksgiving celebrations reflect our experiences living abroad as a whole. We spend most of the year immersed in otherness, a constant newness I personally find exciting and fresh,  exotic and educational. Over time, we adopt some of that newness as our own. Before my experience living in Spain, I couldn't imagine eating dinner outside of my family's customary 6:15-7:30 window. Now the thought of life without a mid-day siesta, eating dinner before 9 (or, God forbid, the senior citizen early bird special), forgoing tapas or tortilla (Spanish omelette) is horrifying; the idea of being able to go grocery shopping or do other normal errands on a Sunday seems absurd. I don't know how long it will take me to stop saying "hasta luego" at the end of every conversation or "perdona" when I bump into someone in the street. All of these very Spanish things have become an important part of me, Alissa-in-2013.

I think Thanksgiving maintains its power even over slowly-adapting expat lives because of its near universality within the US. American Indians apart, every family has a Thanksgiving ritual (even if, as in some cases, it's a lack of ritual). The holiday follows the powerful narrative of "becoming American"-- anyone can take part, regardless of religion, creed, or race; whether there's quinoa in the stuffing, curry on the turkey, or no turkey at all. Our memories of these days each year-whether they include elaborate cooking or family squabbles or beer and football or long drives or quiet time on the couch-- are something we can use as a marker, to remind us of who we were before we became our expat selves. And that makes Thanksgiving something that we can share back with the people who make our new lives abroad so rich. Thanksgiving means that we can say, if only for one day-- here, you've taught me so much about new music, new traditions, new tastes. Let me show you a little about where I'm from. Let me remind myself.


The glorious pies, against their very Spanish tiled "azulejo" background: maybe the epitome of what Expat Thanksgiving can mean





Evidence of a successful day

Tastes of Africa

After a long radio silence, I am attempting to get back in the blogging spirit. It's harder than I expected to make room in my life for regular writing and reflection, especially when I've been moving around so much. In the past 6 weeks, I've had a good friend visit from the UK, gotten the stomach flu, showed my parents around northern Spain and savored the power of Easter celebrations here, and journeyed to Africa for the first time on a seven-day sojourn to Morocco. There hasn't been much time to catch my breath (and what time I've had has gone to... well, doing just that.) I'm so behind that it will be awhile until a post on Morocco appears on here for real, so I thought I'd post a small taste of two particularly powerful sensory experiences to tide you over.

1) We stopped in the small northern-Morocco town of Meknes for a few days but were disappointed by an initial 48 hours filled with torrential rain. Although we enjoyed walking the winding backstreets of the city's medina and visiting the remains of a Roman town in the Atlas foothills, for me the highlight was the last night.

The rain had finally cleared, filling the Meknes main square with people celebrating the end of holy Friday. A snake charmer half-heartedly piped his flute, a lazy-looking viper draped across his arm; children played a carnival-like game fishing for soda bottles with oversized rods; nearby, a crowd of men seemed to be cheering on a street performer who was teaching two pint-sized boys to box (?) But my favorite was the band.

Walking the square, I happened to catch a street band playing traditional Moroccan gnawa music to a rapt crowd. The last rays of sun reflected on the tattooed faces of old Berber women, young guys in skinny jeans, women in hijab and out. Above, a cloud of swallows swooped over the ornate gate to the Imperial palace. The music was rhythmic and emotive, and the men's voices wove in and out of the drum beat, occasionally uniting with a power that soared higher than the swallows. What drugs could ever replicate such a high?

2) A few days later in Meknes, my father and I spent a very lovely evening eating Syrian food and bonding with a diverse community of couchsurfers in Rabat (A Somalian-American studying Arabic poetry; a French-Brazilian working with refugees; a Moroccan physicist seeking to break the glass ceiling in her Ph.D program; a Korean doing his country's equivalent of the Peace Corps.)

After tea on their balcony overlooking Rabat's estuary, we returned to the hotel to check on my mother, who was having stomach problems. She reported that she was feeling better and that she had been hearing "some kind of wonderful live music, and very close by." We found out just how close by a few moments later, when the musicians took up their posts after a break, and we discovered that they were playing in the courtyard of the neighboring building. As our room was essentially a cabana on the roof of the hotel, we were able to look directly down at the proceedings.

There, a very exuberant, and exuberantly loud celebration was taking place, with the resonant drums, powerful voices, and complex rhythms that evoke images of West Africa. For a time, I stood in the chill watching, wanting desperately to run next door and knock on the door--but it seemed like perhaps this was a religious rite. Instead, I let the very foreign sounds wash over me, watched the women moving their legs and arms in sinuous rhythm, drummers pounding a seemingly endless and powerful tattoo.

Luckily, the main part of the ritual seemed to end at midnight, and the revelers retired to the inside of their building to continue the party. Even so, my dreams were still tinted with African voices. When I woke, hours later, and went out onto the cold balcony to use the detached bathroom, they were still at it-- though the sky to the east was just beginning to lighten.

Making Tracks in Sydney: Part 2

Very, very early the next morning I found my way through the tangle of Sydney public transportation the Sydney Fish Market. Sonia met me there and we walked around the entire building, which spanned a couple of city blocks, finally threading our way through a busy parking lot filled with burly men delivering fish, to the entrance. It wasn't well-signed, but we found the area where bidders could sit and watch the products reeled off, and got comfortable.

It was a Dutch Auction, which means that the starting price is actually way too high, and bidders buzz in like on a game show when they see a price they're willing to pay-- and hope they're the first to do so. We were told by a very nice man working at the auction (a bidder himself) that this is to make things "as fair as possible" because no one can drive the price up on purpose, although Sonia (who studied economics) had some reasons I didn't really understand for feeling skeptical about this. The bidder pointed out all of the different areas of the fish warehouse to us, explained about the various abbreviations the auctionmaster was using, and was generally very nice. I found the auction to be quite exciting. There was constant movement far below us on the floor as new variants of fish, squid, prawns, lobsters arrived and were sorted; layered on this was the buzz of people checking out sorted product; and on top of it all swas the constant drone of the auctionmaster selling another 15 kilos of King Prawns or swordfish.


View from the bidding platform at Sydney Fish Market



I had agreed to meet several couch surfers in a hip area of Sydney called Newtown for coffee, but the fish market started (and ended) so early that I had a couple of hours to kill. I got some breakfast in another part of the market's cavernous building, surrounded by fish traders getting off work. There, I discovered a quirk of Australian culture-- if you buy a "sausage roll" you get a fried sausage wrapped in something like a spring roll wrapper. But if you buy an "egg and bacon" roll you get eggs, bacon (which in Australia is actually more like fatty fried ham), and barbecue sauce on a sub roll. Go figure.

I decided to spend my remaining time finding my way to the Town Hall area, which has lovely architecture. As previously mentioned, I spent a little while looking around and sitting on the steps listening to "I Come From the Land Down Under" by Men at Work and feeling too clever and snarky for my own good. I should mention, however, that I have since had my comeuppance. As it turns out Australians love this song. I heard it several times during my travels-- a couple times on the radio, once at a public pool in Brisbane, and once performed by a two-man didjeridoo-and-guitar band in Airlie Beach (but that comes later.) My previous thought had been that it was too gimmicky and silly, but I guess it's kind of like how I love the song "Dirty Water" by The Standells (which, for those not in the know, is about Boston.)

Sydney Town Hall


As it turned out, the Newtown coffee excursion was quite the affair. We ended up 13 in all, from all over the world and a few Aussies as well. Newtown is a vaguely alternative-flavored neighborhood (my host mother told me to look out for "those gothics") with lots of coffee shops, funky bars, and vintage clothing stores. We took advantage of one of the more spacious establishments, then after a light lunch a chunk of us broke off to head to Manly Beach.

If you're not familiar with it, Sydney Harbor has a crazy amount of nooks and crannies, and it makes use of an extensive ferry network to connect by water what would take a long time to travel between on land. This includes several beautiful beaches (Bondi is probably the most famous). We chose Manly because we'd heard the ferry ride was quite nice and none of us had been on the Sydney ferry before. The day had been overcast, but the sun started to burn through the clouds as the little old boat made its way across the water. I put on suntan lotion (as usual, under the ozone layer hole it was a losing battle) and admired amazing views of the bridge/Opera house from the water.

No seriously, how beautiful is this building?


The walk through the center of Manly town to the beach had a lovely carnival atmosphere, and we enjoyed lounging on the beach people watching, chatting, and dipping our toes in the surf. When we got hungry, instead of getting individual ice creams at the inflated prices along the boardwalk we went into the nearest supermarket and purchased a two-liter container of ice cream and 6 spoons. We took the spoils of this victory to the wharf overlooking the Manly lagoon. Life was pretty good.

Enjoying ice cream on the pier, communal style. From left: Kailash (India), Wil (England), Nicole (New Zealand), Sofia (USA), Damian (Australia)



We were all enjoying each other too much to finish so early in the afternoon. It was a Friday and we joined in the post-work festivities back on the mainland, making our way to The Hart pub. There we feasted on a free "sausage sizzler" and I had my customary cider (this variety called Pipsqueak, which I think is a pretty awesome name for a cider.) I don't know if I have mentioned here before that Australians love their sausages (I've heard they're called 'snags' sometimes but never heard someone say it to my face.) Usually they are prepared on a "barbie" with grilled onions or peppers and served on white bread (not rolls) with "tomato sauce," which is like ketchup but sweeter.

We stayed at The Hart well into the night, but jet lag was still playing games with me and I had to leave early. It was lucky I did. Remember before I mentioned that I was accosted by cute tween America-loving goths? Well, the following scene took place when I stepped onto the Burwood line at Town Hall station:

I was bleary eyed, trying to stay awake and discern whether the train I boarded would, indeed, be stopping at Burwood, when two goth kids dressed all in black with lots of eye make up, identical streaks of deep pink in their hair, and five or six piercings almost at random on their faces, accosted me. They were decorated so similarly that I wondered if they were siblings of boyfriend and girlfriend.

They yelled at me (but friendly-like) across the carriage, "Are you American!?!?" then trotted up to be closer. Without waiting for me to respond, the girl exclaimed, "If I go to America I want to go to ___, Ohio " (here she named a town so teeny and random I can't remember it now; she wanted to go because is the home town of her favorite emo band.) She considered for a moment. "Or Disneyland."

The two of them looked at me with fascination and wonder, as if I was an alien, as if they had never met an American before. Maybe they hadn't, but this was the first time in this country I had been treated as such an anomaly. They asked me maybe 10 questions in a row about life in America, rapid fire. I tried to rev my sleepy brain and answer.

" I want to go to America so bad," the girl said again. She giggled. Almost no pause, and then: "Have you tried Vegemite?"
"She shouldn't," said her brother/boyfriend, "She won't like it."
"But it's so Australian!" she shot back.
"Well, I'm pretty Australian and I don't like it."

They got off at the next stop, waving at me and telling me to say hi to Ohio for them, leaving a burst of Aussie goth perkiness in their wake. I could see their magenta streaks bouncing through the crowd at the station as they headed toward the stairs.

The Right Way to Drink a Guinness

Lesson #1 of my Ireland trip: If you ever go to Ireland, be aware-- the Irish are watching how you drink your Guinness, and they are judging you for it.

Day 1 of my Irish Extravaganza was one of the longest days of my life, both literally (it kind of stretched on for 48 hours) and figuratively. My mother put me in the security line at Logan Airport around 3:00 PM EST on Friday and my histamines promptly revved to life, for no reason I could understand. Benadryl didn't seem to help, and I spent all of the flight to New York and much of the flight to Dublin sneezing uncontrollably. After a couple of hours my nose was raw and red, and even after I stopped sneezing it continued to run, so I had the good fortune of entering Ireland continually wiping my red, raw nose and looking much like a cocaine addict. Other than allergies, my flight went swimmingly. Waiting to board in JFK I chatted with an Irish woman waiting to go home and see family, my first encounter with the famous Irish friendliness. The over-sea flight was nowhere near full, so I had my own two-seat row and was able to stretch out a little and get a few hours of sleep.

I'm not sure why, but I had somehow expected that it would be at least a little bit light when we arrived in Dublin. However, we arrived around 6:30 AM GMT (half an hour early after leaving 45 minutes late...huh?) and it was finally beginning to get light as I emerged from customs an hour and a half later. There I encountered my first bout of culture shock. I had agreed to call Emily to let her know I would be catching the train to the Trinity gates, but I had no idea how many of the digits from the number I dialed in the states would apply in country. It took me a full four tries staring down the public phone before she sleepily answered, and then I set out to find the AirCoach, another confusing feat.

I met Emily in front of the Trinity University gates, and we walked the fifteen minutes to her flat, which is in the famous area of Merrion Square. It's quite remarkable that Emily's program placed her in this area, which is all Georgian townhouses, very posh (pictures will follow once I am stateside.) We ate some (homemade!) banana bread and got me coffee and then set out into the Dublin morning, wandering around the city for what turned out to be almost 4 hours. I barely noticed-- I was too busy the accents, the mix of more modern and older architecture, local and internatioanl flavors, just all the difference around me. We walked around Trinity, down Grafton Street (a pedestrian shopping district,) and up to Dublin Castle, then stopped for a brunch-like meal at The Queen of Tarts, a positively adorable coffee shop across from the castle where everything was red. At one point I was telling Emily about the bevy of drug issues that seem to crop up in Belmont and the chatter in the cafe got quiet as I uttered the words "underage prostitution and cocaine ring." The couple sitting next to us and who had been shooting us curious looks dissolved into laughter. It was awkwardly hilarious.

At about this time my body gave out for the first time (it had been 36 hours since I got any decent sleep), and so we went back to the house until Emmalee came into the city from Dublin City University, where she and Katrina are studying, about 4 km away. We got a lunch/dinner type meal and went on a quest to Tesco, a grocery store, where many Brits and Janie had gone before me. Although I had just intended to get snacks and breakfast food, we ended up doing a full investigative mission, as I've always heard you can learn a lot about a place from its grocery stores. What we found was: the Busty Cake (picture forthcoming). Yes, a cake shaped like breasts. I'm not sure what this product's availabity in family supermarkets says about modern Irish society.

We met up with Emily and Katrina and spent our night in the city-- first at a lovely Italian restaurant, then Stag's Head Pub, where there happened to be live traditional Irish music. The Pub was everything you could ever want a pub to be. Dimly lit with shiny wood finishing and a map from before the USSR broke up. Busy, bustling, crowded. Getting to the bar required a great deal of physical force and elbows, but we managed to get drinks and, after a bit of good luck, a table right next to the performers. The live music was just wonderful and rollicking, featuring an Irish flute, a strange drum whose name unfortunately escapes me, and Irish guitar. The group performed covers (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon) and more traditional pieces, a Mummer's dance and a lot of old folk songs that involved drinking, lost women, and love for Old Eire. As time went on, and the crowd got drunker and drunker, the bar started to fill with people singing along. Once we past the 11:30 mark, some started to dance, too-- traditional step dancing, which was wonderful to watch and looks like a lot of fun.

Spirits were especially high because of a very important rugby match between Ireland and France that was to go on the next day. An especially vocal bunch of drunk Frenchmen in French colors took a liking to Emmalee, insisting that she dance with them and asking her to sit on their laps. While we looked on, amused, an Irish woman who looked like she couldn't have been much older than us, maybe 26, introduced herself. We talked to her, her boyfriend, and his friends for the rest of the night. It was she who taught me the Guinness lesson. When a particularly intoxicated girl was starting to act disorderly, we were speculating as to her nationality, and Allison claimed that she could not be Irish because Irish people don't let Guinness "go stale"-- when it loses its head and instead gets sort of soap bubble foam on the top. Lesson# 1: completed.

We stayed at the Stag's Head for more than three hours, but I, for one, was completely content. Surrounded by the sweet music, happily singing drunks, and free flowing talk (an Irish man found out Emily was from Maryland and couldn't stop talking about Chesapeake Bay), we learned the choruses to knee-slapping songs, nursed our drinks (I am partial to Bulmer's hard cider, I have discovered) and soaked in the strength of pub camraderie. I felt completely high on all the difference. That's really the only way to describe the soaring feeling in my chest, just purely thrilled at being allowed to experience this slice of life. I couldn't help thinking as I looked around at the packed pub-- why would I want to spend money on anything but this feeling? This is why I travel.