Thanksgiving

I had a nice Thanksgiving in Buenos Aires! It's the third Thanksgiving I've spent in the southern hemisphere, but it never ceases to be very strange to celebrate a fall harvest holiday in the spring. And yet on the other hand it is really nice to celebrate Thanksgiving in a foreign country... as I often say, it's one of the few "truly American" traditions, and it's nice to share that with people from other cultures.

In the afternoon on Thanksgiving, I had a nice dinner at the American club. The whole experience was a bit odd... it was full of middle-aged Argentine men with no clear connection to the US. I got the feeling they worked for American companies and the employers had bought tickets and given them out to the employees. It was nice to have some turkey, though, and I got to share the experience with my American friend Caroline.

This is me with Caroline and one of the Argentines we befriended. He's young but I promise almost everyone else was old! :)

After the American Club dinner, I came home and cooked up a few Thanksgiving dishes of my own. My American roommate Liz invited some friends over to our house for a modified (vegetarian) Thanksgiving meal.

Here I am with my Argentine roommate Magdalena (left) and my roommate Liz's friend Dani (middle). We had a nice group of about 10 people, most of whom ended up being European!

Here is the food we cooked. As you can tell, it's not quite traditional. :) I made the mashed potatoes, stuffing, and gravy, all of which miraculously ended up tasting pretty normal. It was an interesting experience trying to figure out what spices were absolutely necessary for the stuffing, and then trying to find them in a country where people don't use spices ever!! The pumpkin-pie looking thing is a savory Argentine "tarta de dos colores" that my roommate Liz decided to make because it has a layer of pumpkin, just like pumpkin pie...

... which she also made! The cookie in this picture is a pumpkin cookie from a mix that Mom sent. The cookies were a HUGE hit, both with the Thanksgiving guests and at the office the next day when I took in the leftovers! (And Liz made some baked apples for good measure, which are also pictured here.)

Although Thanksgiving isn't a holiday here, this weekend was also a long weekend by chance, because Monday was a holiday here. Apparently Argentina has something like 28 national holidays each year, when practically everything closes. So a group of friends and I decided to take advantage of the day off and head to a small gaucho (cowboy) town about 2 hours north of Buenos Aires called San Antonio de Areco. It turned out to be a much sleepier village than we anticipated, and given that it was also a holiday so almost all the stores and restaurants were closed, we were in for a veeeery relaxed day. :)

Here we are by the river: my church friends Tazzy, Alice, and me. In the afternoon, lots of locals were going swimming, despite the brown water and the signs warning of pollution. It did look fun though, especially given how hot it was!

We also tried to visit a gaucho museum. It ended up that it has been mostly closed for renovations since it flooded in a storm in 2009 (hmm.. that was two years ago) but we did get to see a couple of rooms with gaucho memorabilia, and at least we could say we tried!

This was the part of the gaucho museum that was closed for renovation. It was an old "estancia" house where a wealthy landowner/ranch owner would live and manage the ranch.

I suppose I should have taken a picture of the Plaza where we got some cold and therefore much-appreciated ice cream, but that was really pretty much the only other thing to see in San Antonio de Areco. So we got lots of high-quality time to hang out and relax before we boarded the evening bus back to Buenos Aires. And now on Friday it's off to Peru!!