My Thanksgiving

Ahhh, Sunday…my day of rest.

Now to catch you all up on the last few days.

Thursday was “Real Thanksgiving.” It was at least half way through the day before I even realized it was Thanksgiving. I woke up, got ready and headed off to work. After work I ran errands, went home, ate…normal, day-day stuff. I bought a new pair of boots. I still absolutely love the ones I bought in Murcia, but now that I’ve worn them religiously for 2 years they are pretty worn out, plus the small heal really hurts my feet when walking up and down all these Siles hills. About 3:15 I went back to school to meet Antonio and Inés. Inés had a physical therapy appointment in La Puerta and asked Antonio to come along and watch her son. I tagged along as something to do. Antonio, me and Inés son (who is about 16 months old) walked from one end of La Puerta to the other looking for a place to sit and eat, or at least get a cup of coffee. Everything, except the hair salon, and two cafes were closed (you could die of hunger but at least your hair would look nice!). La Puerta isn’t that big but my feet were so tired by the time we settled at one of the cafes for a coffee. Antonio “invited me” to a coffee and when Inés was done with her appointment she met us there. Here, “to invite” someone doesn’t just mean they can come along with you…it means they pay for you. I learned this during my stay in Murcia. I never really thought about it but when I mentioned the different between the word in Spanish and English one of my Spanish friends was surprised…”so you invite someone to come with you, then make them pay?” Haha…ummm…yes?

I think we must have been quite a site as we were walking around town. Walking with Antonio and a Spanish-looking little kid I feel like more people overlooked the fact that I was blond and blue-eyed and gave me the benefit of the doubt that I probably spoke Spanish...or that I was Antonio’s wife and Inés son was my own. Haha. Inés son had fallen asleep during our walk and woke up just before we left the café. Poor kid…he seemed so confused to wake up in an unfamiliar place and he cried basically all the way back to Siles.

Anyways, after Inés appointment and our coffee we went back to Siles. Inés dropped me off at my apartment.

People don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here so there was no time off from work, no turkeys cooking, and no big dinners being prepared all day long. I was doing totally fine not being home for Thanksgiving until late afternoon/evening. Things kind of started to go downhill from there a little. I was in my apartment by myself. None of my friends were available to get together and “Happy Thanksgiving” status updates started taking over Facebook. I got to talk to my family a bit which was really nice, but then I debated just going to bed early. I was feeling a little sad and trying just to remind myself that “My Thanksgiving” was tomorrow. That thought reassured me a little, but I was still afraid that everyone was going to bail on our dinner plans. So many people had given me wishy-washy confirmations, or jumped back and forth about whether or not they were coming. I eventually just watched a little bit of the movie “Elf” online, had a good chuckle and hit the hay.

I’m a little nervous that I reacted this way for Thanksgiving. I really was totally fine with it until the very last minute. I don’t think it will be the same for Christmas though. I think part of the issue was that no one here was doing anything. A holiday that’s normally pretty important went completely unrecognized by everyone except me. At least everyone here celebrates Christmas, so even though I’ll be without my family there will still be celebrating and I’ve been invited to spend the day with Almudena’s family.

Friday was “My Thanksgiving” and it was a total 180 from the night before. Friday was absolutely fantastic. I slept in a bit and then got to work. I needed to clean my apartment, try to bake my pumpkin pie from fresh pumpkin, get the food for dinner and do some laundry. I had dressed up a little for the day, just for the heck of it, so I felt like Suzy Homemaker all dolled up, making pie, doing chores and getting ready to play hostess all at the same time. I talked to Ben and Eve (the 2 auxiliares from La Puerta) and they said that they were going to come for dinner. The bus schedule is really irregular around here so I wasn’t sure if they were going to get here at 4, 7, 10 or God knows when. Also Luis was coming over to start preparing the food. I decided to cancel my Friday evening private lesson so I could have enough time to get stuff done.

Of course, Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a few hiccups. My main hiccup was the fact that in the middle of cooking and doing laundry I lost power in my apartment for two hours. Initially I wasn’t concerned. There was still light outside and I figured as soon as my landlady got home she would switch the power back on like normal. I actually loose power on a fairly regular basis, but usually Ma Cele is home and can fix it (the breaker box is in her apartment). So I waited…and I waited…and I waited…and got more and more anxious that maybe we wouldn’t have power for our Thanksgiving dinner. Then the sun started to go down and I realized I had no candles, lanterns, etc so I called Ma Cele.

“Hey Ma Cele…it’s Erica. When are you coming home?”
“Sunday, why?”
“Oh. Hmmm, well we lost power again.”
“Hmmm…Are you home?”
“Yes.”
“Ok, I’ll call my brother and have him come fix it.”
“Awesome. Thank you!”

So her brother Pedro (who is one of the police officers in town) came to the apartment and got the power back on. The minute he left the power went off again. I called him and he came back. He flipped it on again and then waited. I didn’t have very many things turned on, so we turned on almost everything in the apartment to see if we were going to loose power again as soon as he left. Everything seemed ok so he headed out and said to just call him again if the problem persists.

I finished up cleaning, but knew I wasn’t going to have enough time to bake the pie now. About the time that my private lesson would have been my doorbell rang. “Gosh dang it!” I figured it was the private lesson family in yet another scheduling communication mishap. I went upstairs and luckily it was just Almudena and Maria. They had been going back and forth with me all week about whether or not they were coming. They kept coming up with lame excuses not to come. They had stopped by to talk to me about the dinner. I explained who was coming, who wasn’t, and that Ben and Eve were coming now too. The latest excuse,

“Well maybe there are too many people now and we should just get a coffee or something with you later.”
“It’s up to you but for Thanksgiving the more the merrier and we really only have 2 or 3 more than originally planned.”

So they caved.
“Ok. We’ll be back about 9.”

Luis showed up about 10 minutes later and we headed to the store. He brought me some homemade tomato/pizza/pasta sauce and jam from his mom and the mixer that I needed for my pie. We picked up everything we needed and went back to prep…well…for him to start prepping and for me to drink wine and find music for us to listen to. Haha! Thanksgiving at my house without having to make anything? Lucky me!

By some miracle almost everyone showed up right about nine. We still had a couple no-shows but since Ben and Eve decided to come it worked out evenly. We had 7 people total for dinner and 3 more joined us a little later.

The food was awesome. We had Spanish tapas and Luis even used some of my pumpkin on one of them. There was no turkey, and the only potatoes we had were in the form of our Spanish tortilla, but it was really good. The portion sizes were good too, so none of us fell into the normal American-Thanksgiving-induced coma after dinner. Quite the opposite in fact. Fun fact...the two most requested songs of the night from the Spanish guys..."Empire State of Mind" by Alicia Keys and "Love the Way You Lie" by Eminem and Rihanna. We all hung out, ate, chatted and drank wine and after dinner we headed out for our “First Annual Thanksgiving Spanish Bar Crawl.” We started off at Menphys, then off to Nicols, then over to 1900. Our last stop was supposed to be Pub JJ but it was closed so we went back to Menphys. At 4am they flipped the lights on and it was time to go home. Ben and Eve decided to wait at Menphys because one of the bartenders lives in La Puerta and offered them a ride home. They ended up staying there until 7am. I went home and crashed.



Saturday I spent most of the day in bed nursing my first Spanish hangover. I eventually got up to get some water, some food and a shower and then felt much better. At 5 I had plans to go over to Almudena’s house. They were having dessert and coffee with friends to celebrate Almudena’s daughter’s 2nd birthday before the family came over for dinner. After this mini-celebration Maria and a few others left but Almudena invited me to stay for the main party. A bunch of family showed up, blew up balloons, put up decorations, brought food, etc. etc. Adriana had been in her room playing so the living went from normal to party central without her evening knowing it. When they finally brought her out she was visibly went through a series of emotions…especially ‘frightened’ at all the people shouting “Feliz Cumple” and then quickly to crazy 2-year old excitement. It didn’t take her long to find and open the confetti filled piñata that popped and spread confetti-happiness all over the living room. The rest of the night was spent listening to music, eating, watching Adriana open her presents, Adriana giving people makeovers with her new Barbie make-up set and more eating. All in all there were 3 cakes/desserts in addition to the pizza, sandwiches, chips, tapas and drinks.





Just before 10pm I headed out. Luis had called to see if I wanted to do something. Obviously after Friday night neither of us was totally thrilled about the idea of going out. We decided on a movie at my place.

Ok…I didn’t really think about what a challenge that was going to be. You would think, yes, for a nice, relaxing evening at home, a movie is just the thing…wrong. First problem…I don’t have a DVD player attached to my TV and DVDs in this region are different from the US (so I can’t play them on my computer). Luckily Luis brought over a DVD player. Ok, problem number one fixed. Problem number 2…Luis’ Castellano (what we know as Spanish) is basically flawless, but he is from Catalonia, where they speak Catalan. I never notice any errors in his Castellano but every now and then, especially with things like movies, he’ll comment on how fast they speak. I speak English, and although my Castellano is good, watching movies in Spanish is still taxing. I have to really concentrate, which makes the purpose of watching a movie to relax basically impossible. Then began the debate over what language we watch the movie in, do we have subtitles, what language should the subtitles be in, which movies do we have that fit all those requirements, etc, etc. Goodness gracious. We ended up watching “Noise” which I think is a totally weird idea for a movie. It was in Castellano but we didn’t have subtitles, so I listened and followed along with the general idea.

Today, Sunday, was a totally lazy day. I did a load of laundry and tried to get caught up on the dishes from Friday’s dinner. I also made a pizza. It certainly wasn’t hard because I used a pre-made crust, and I definitely used too much tomato sauce but it was still good. I wish I could have been a little more productive, but oh well. I’m heading to bed so I can try to be up early in the morning to make up for not doing anything today.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!