Thanksgiving...or a Lack Thereof

Hello all...Hope you all had a good Thanksgiving, and that if you decided to participate in Black Friday, your fate was a little better than the fellow who got trampled in a Walmart on Friday morning...Oh, America. That's one piece of US current events that I don't think I will be sharing with my French friends ;)

Thanksgiving was pretty sad this year since I wasn't home for the meal and for my dad's birthday the next day, but I wasn't the only one in that boat, so it wasn't too bad. I'm at least glad that I'll be spending Christmas with my landlady and her family, so I'm hoping that being with a family will make up for the fact that it's not my own!

So on the actual day of Thanksgiving, I had 5 hours of classes. After class, Robert and I decided that we wanted to make Thanksgiving dinner. Since his roommates already had dinner guests planned, we decided that it would be an American-only affair at my place (with the exception of my roommate Eva). Robert's friend Brian from California, who's in the middle of a 6 month long trip through Europe, came along too. I tried my darndest to make a Thanksgiving meal, but as I've learned time and time again with our attempts at American cuisine (Mexican food, hamburgers, etc) we couldn't expect to find much at my neighborhood French supermarket, Leader Price.

I don't think we did too badly! They obviously didn't have whole turkeys, so I made turkey breasts with bread crumbs (...which I made by toasting bread and crumbling it.) which was kind of like turkey and stuffing...Green beans, rolls, and mashed 'taters!

It was nice, and I think it was fun for Eva too, because while it was all of our first Thanksgivings away from home, it was her first Thanksgiving ever...and she got to practice her English! (Brian doesn't speak French...or German, for that matter, haha)

The next night, we went to Grenoble, a little city in the French Alps an hour south of Lyon. There is another EAP program there as well, with about 20 other University of California students. We went to a restaurant on their campus for "Thanksgiving Dinner". I put this in quotes because, well, although they tried, it was definitely not a normal Thanksgiving meal.

We received a bunch of appetizers that were pretty French...ravioli and mussels, bread, wine, salad, etc...Then came the main dish:

They tried. They really did...they had sweet potatoes, a little bit of cranberry sauce, and pumpkin gratin...But that's not even turkey! haha! Also, as much as I have begun to notice the pejorative nature of this aspect of American culture, Thanksgiving is one time that an overabundance of food is OK. This meager helping...not OK.

However, even if the meal wasn't very Thanksgiving, it was still delicious. And another plus of the dinner:

IT WAS SNOWING IN GRENOBLE!

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas...and I mean real, snowy Christmas!