Where In The World Is Vincent Giannotti: Thanksgiving

A WAYYYY while back was Thanksgiving. This was my 3^rd time missing the holiday (my first time in China and the second in Botswana) although you have been away for it before, it doesn’t mean that you become numb to the sensation of missing your family or eating the best food of the year. The second one is only accentuated more while living in a county with limited dietary variations. Now there are a considerable amount food items which I miss. But to save me from the agony, I will not go into the foodthatmustnotbenamed.

Fulbright obviously knows this and for Thanksgiving they did us a solid.

Ovens in Nepal are about as elusive as a yeti. Any ‘baked good’ you purchase here must be judged on a totally different scale than back home. Even in Kathmandu, the only houses I have seen with ovens are those of embassy employees.

For Thanksgiving, Fulbright had arranged a van to take us back to Kathmandu so that we could celebrate with everyone and have a real Thanksgiving meal. Spending Thanksgiving with all of Fulbright, along with many people from the Embassy, was wonderful but the true highlight was when the van that Fulbright had arranged came a day early to deliver us pies (real pies, apple and pumpkin!) for us to share with our families. Needless to say, we were stoked. That afternoon we went from house to house sharing our pies with our families.

Cutting the pie with the family

Julia and I being true cross-cultural ambassadors, drinking roxi with are apple pie

Krista and her host fam

We also celebrated Thanksgiving with our ACCESS Program. And because who wouldn’t want to eat mashed potatoes and Nepali Turkey (chicken) two days in a row, we split the group up into two. The night before, we met up and prepared mashed potatoes:

Only to realize the next day that 10kg we had prepared the previous day with garlic and milk had turned sour. Having not cooked for several months and thus not had to worry about refrigeration, we had completely spaced until we smelled the rancid pot of potatoes. We quickly were forced to make the meal again, but it turned out just as tasty and with a little less food poisoning.