Happy Turkey Day in Spain!

A couple of weeks ago Lauren and I offered to host Thanksgiving at our apartment for all our fellow Teach in Spain folks around the Cadiz area. Of course, being hosts this meant that the bird was our responsibility. Lauren took care of asking for a 4-kilo turkey at the local open air market last week (she said she kept feeling like she’d signed some turkey’s death warrant – it probably wouldn’t have gotten the chop until Christmas otherwise), and I grabbed a bucket from the local equivalent of Meijer to brine the turkey in. Lauren took care of the sweet potatoes (she also brought some to her class to sample – they loved it!), I covered the mashed, friends brought stuffing, salad, pasta, bread, apple pies (delicious!) and drinks.











































































Jell–O substituted for cranberry sauce, and we had minor electrical problems a few hours before the food was to be served. Apparently you can’t use the stove AND the oven at the same time in our apartment. (Sidenote: Lauren and I have come up with a response to anything here that we believe works in an inefficient or nonsensical manner – raise your right fist in the air, shake it, and shout “Spain!”)

The nice Spanish couple in the apartment below us helped us figure it out (“Wait for the oven to cool down for ½ an hour, turn everything off, then try the circuit breaker again.”), for which we will be forever thankful and will also bring them a bottle of wine, which we are currently not lacking in. In Spain, whenever a guest doesn’t know what to bring, wine is always a good fallback.

Our apartment isn’t huge, but we wanted to share Thanksgiving with friends we had met in Spain, so we told everyone to invite a guest. We had a range of people come, from roommates of friends to the random guy from Iceland that we met on the train on the way back from Granada who seemed in need of some friends, to Lauren’s tutoring student. It ended up being one of the most international Thanksgivings I’ve ever been at. Total guests numbered at least 20, with representation from the USA, Spain, France, Iceland, Sweden, Czech Republic, and the Dominican Republic. Here’s a Happy Thanksgiving from all of us in Spain:


Happy Thanksgiving from Spain! from Catherine Steiner on Vimeo.

P.S. Being a history major, I wanted to emphasize the history and culture of Thanksgiving when I taught about it to my classes this week (how it started in 1621, but wasn’t declared a national holiday until 1863 by Abe Lincoln, how the Native Americans helped the pilgrims get food). It turns out that history is history, however, and it didn’t really get too interesting for them until I started emphasizing points such as “half the pilgrims DIED that winter”, or told them that the Macy’s Parade floats were taller than their school building and showed pictures as evidence. I wish I had video-taped their reactions to the float pictures…I think they were even more excited than when I had given them candy for Halloween.