Thanksgiving 2007

We were the only ones left in town out of our "work family" during Thanksgiving Day. Our kids still had school that day as the Canadians see fit to be thankful on an altogether different day, which we found very inconvenient, but classically Canadian. So the kids went to school while Philip and I did some Christmas shopping. One of our favorite restaurants in town (popular with the expats) was purportedly having a bonified American Thanksgiving dinner. They claimed to have real turkey and even homemade dressing. As the other option was to purchase a $250 imported Butterball turkey (yes, you did read that correctly) for t-day at home, we decided to take our chances. We were impressed! The turkey was actually turkey! The whole meal was very good and was complete with oyster dressing and some much-coveted cranberry sauce.

The whole restaurant was full of other Americans that had crawled out of the wood work - where in the world ARE these people every other day of the year? We all smiled warmly and said "Happy Thankgiving" to each other like we were family, and I guess, in a way, we were. It really struck me that none of us introduced ourselves to one another. It was like there was enough comraderie and commonality among us, simply as Americans, to enjoy the "big, extended family" feeling and leave it at that. It seemed as if we were all able to understand that anonymity was needed. Maybe everyone there subconsciously concluded that since we are all daily swallowed up by a culture with no personal space or respect for privacy, that each of us, at least for one night, needed to be with his own.

(Ok, yes, it is highly more likely that we are just Americans who really love anonymity and personal space and were too excited to eat a real turkey to care about saying hello, but the other makes for a much warmer, fuzzier Thanksgiving entry.)

Diwali 2007

Oops. Diwali (pronounced di-VAH-lee in India) actually happened before Frank and Daryl came to visit. It's all a little foggy anyway. Below are some pics from the great Indian festival that shuts down the entire country. Bigger than Christmas in the US, Diwali is a wild holiday that includes massive amounts of commercial grade fireworks and other occassionally homemade pyrotechnics. There are no rules and no limits. Fireworks begin going off around 4 am and continue incessantly until around 5am the next day. As in on the street in front of our house. We were waiting for Cubbon's hair to start falling out. Of course, he never went outside into the noise, but the noise found him anyway. It found us too. Not much sleep was had, but the festival was preceeded by a fabulous school performance and really fun afterparty with some of the families from Houston's class.