Thanksgiving!

Even though I wasn't lucky enough to be home this Thanksgiving (it doesn't sound like my house could have fit me anyway since they said they had 23 people...), I did get the pleasure of celebrating it twice here in Azerbaijan!

The first was at my house with my host family.  I cooked chickens (there has been a lot of fowl death in the village so a turkey wasn't available) with stuffing, mashed potatoes, apple crisp, and garlic bread.  And then my mom sent me canned cranberry sauce from America.  And my host mom made a cake-ish thing and bought another cake thing from the store.  It was delicious.  My whole host family got really into everything, helping to decorate the table, wanting to know what I was making and how, etc.  And 2 of my co-English teachers and my neighbors came over too, which was so much fun.  My host mom asked me to translate for her "your daughter cooks very well" so that I could put her on the phone with my real mom, but we had calling difficulties that day.  Unrelated to the holiday except that this happened to my poor family several times as they tried to call me that day, a word of warning to anyone who tries to call me: frequently it will sound like someone answers the phone...and then you are listening to a porno!  No, this is not me, as many of my family members have apparently thought... This has happened to people trying to call my friend Beth too, and her number is nowhere close to mine so we don't really know what is happening.  Just an extra little surprise delight of calling Azerbaijan!


The second Thanksgiving I had was in Baku at the Ambassador's residence (we don't currently have an ambassador) for all the Peace Corps volunteers with our staff and some embassy staff, including the current stand-in for the ambassador.  It was awesome.  We did it like a pot-luck, so every volunteer brought in some food and we had like 10 turkeys and we ate a lot and were very happy!  And, as an added bonus (as if it wasn't fabulous enough already), Peace Corps arranges for us to stay with embassy families.  My sitemate Beth and I stayed with this amazingly sweet and wonderful couple.  We couldn't have been luckier!  They were so warm and welcoming and gave us such AMAZING food (french toast, scrambled eggs, bacon, blueberry scones...and that's all only what they made for us...they also took us to another embassy apartment to have Thanksgiving left-overs which was like a 3rd Thanksgiving with delicious pumpkin and buttermilk pies...mm).  Can you tell that coming home after the weekend was a little tough??  I didn't even tell you how jealous I was of all the gorgeous apartments I saw!  Foreign service here I come??  Tempting.

I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings!!