Pilgrims in Korea

Here's another belated holiday post for you.

For Thanksgiving, Laura and I tried to organize a potluck at our apartment with all the teachers from school. We even put up a sign-up sheet in the teachers' lounge, which was largely ignored. The Canadian teachers didn't even make the effort to not RSVP--likely due to the fact that we both snubbed them on Canadian (or as I call it, "fake") Thanksgiving back in October. So as the big day drew closer, we were afraid we wouldn't have much to be thankful for this year.

People living in America have a lot to be thankful for. Like FREEDOM, for starters. Or the soothing wave relief that comes from remembering that you aren't from Canada. How about the Emancipation Proclamation? And Billy Mays. You also have a lot turkeys for eating.

Turkeys are so plentiful in America that not even Sarah Palin could kill all of them. In Korea, however, turkeys are almost as rare as dodos, a ButterBall going for 80,000 won (60 bucks American) at the local Costco. What's more, our apartment in Korea doesn't even have an oven, so even if we traded a healthy Korean child on the black market for a turkey, we still wouldn't be able to cook it properly.

So despite the missing turkey, the American teachers still came to our Thanksgiving bash in full force. They brought a cornucopia of dishes that nearly replicated that fateful meal between the pilgrims and the Indians in 1621: deviled eggs, fruit salad stir-fried sweet potatoes, pot roast (from a can) mashed potatoes (from a mix), and gravy (this too, from a mix). For dessert, we of course enjoyed the customary Reese's Peanut Butter Pie.

Thanks to Linda for the pictures and pie.

Midway through the feast our Korean friend, June, stopped by, and like Squanto offering corn to the pilgrims, he prepared kimchee-squid pancakes for us.

And there were even a couple of Canadians who came. They brought the traditional Thanksgiving bottle of gin to wash it all down. It was like we never left the USA.

On a related note, I tried to teach my kids how to draw hand turkeys. As you can see, the purpose of the activity was understood by the students by varying degrees:

My favorite is the Medusa-Turkey.

Expect my Christmas post in late 2011. Please let us know what you were thankful for in the comments.