Post Turkey Day Catch Up Post

Last week, it was Thanksgiving (obviously, for those Americans reading this) and try as I might, none of my Thanksgiving plans wanted to work out. Dave had been told that he had Thursday and Friday off (coincidentally, though it later changed to a half day on Thursday and all of Friday off–that seems to be par for the course at his school. Anyway, when I heard his original schedule, I tried to get us together with my fellow ex-pat friend Abby and her in-laws who live in central France, about four hours away, but of course, the train schedule wasn’t playing nice. Nor were car rental prices.

Then I tried to figure out a way to get to Venice to spend Turkey Day with my cousin Michaela who is studying over there. And that wasn’t happening either.

Argh.

I was pretty bummed and even floated the idea of just pretending Thanksgiving wasn’t happening this year. I mean, I figured it would be easy in a country that doesn’t recognize it as anything. But Dave said it was our first Thanksgiving in France together and we should celebrate it.

Then he said that we should go to Barcelona for the weekend because he found really cheap bus fare and a room on Air B&B! Random and last minute, I know.

So on Wednesday, Dave had a half day from school and hopped the tram to the Odysseum, which is the big outdoor shopping mall with the huge hypermarket that seems to equate to a super WalMart or something. We picked up some necessities for our “dinner” which included green beans, onions, potatoes and a turkey roulé, or a turkey roll (the closest thing we could find to a turkey not in sandwich-slice form). The store had cranberries in a squeeze tube, which weirded us out a bit so we passed on them. And of course, the grocery store here is now carrying whole cranberries next to the other berries in the produce section. You are about a week late, Inno!

Thanksgiving dinner turned out all right…in a shocking turn of events, the mashed potatoes were my favorite (which, let the record show, were mashed with a dinner fork!) We had caramelized onions with the green beans haricot verts, even the turkey tasted good (it may have looked funny, but what can you do?) and we also splurged on a decent bottle of wine. The night was capped off with a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and then off to bed because we had an early bus to Barcelona to catch!

More on our impromptu trip in the next post, but spoiler alert: it was awesome!