A Chinese Thanksgiving

As many of you know, we live in an apartment style dormitory with about 60 ex-pats, most of whom are American, but there are some Brits and Aussies. On the Friday before Thanksgiving one of the girls organized a Thanksgiving dinner. It was a lot of fun! Our apartments are not equipped with a oven or stove, so it makes cooking quite difficult, however the school allowed us to use the home economics kitchens to cook. So there was a variety of delicious Thanksgiving sides. Believe it or not turkey is a North American animal, so we had other poultry such as Chinese roast duck and Kentucky Fried Chicken (a Chinese favorite...seriously they're everywhere!) Jeremy made his favorite Thanksgiving dish, "mom's candied yams," which turned out to be a HUGE hit!We also contributed some other holiday favorites

Friends and teachers

These are the girls with whom I take Chinese lessons.

Thanksgiving day we had the option to go to an all you can eat Thanksgiving buffet at a diner. Jeremy and I just couldn't picture homemade thanksgiving dinner at a diner. Instead we went back to the original roots of thanksgiving to celebrate with the Indians. Well, not exactly the right Indians, but these Indians provided a mean all you can eat/all you can drink Indian buffet, complete with entertainment.

Our Thanksgiving family dinner

The happiest and most energetic dancer ever!

Live video of the dancing.

As an aside, for class on Thanksgiving day, I let my students take a break to learn about the American holiday. I showed them Thanskgiving episodes from the TV show Friends. I taught them the colloquial vocab words used in the episode, then we watched the show, and they had to write a paragraph discribing Thanksgiving. Their answers were pretty entertaining. Everything from you have to have turkey and eat as much as you can to a harvest festival to a lie told to kids about Indians and Pilgrams. What is that holiday anyway? I'm not quite sure, but I know I really missed being with family.