Only once in my life had I spent Thanksgiving away from my family. You may or may not know this, but I really love to eat good food. I also love having big family get-togethers where we have the chance to catch up and play lots of games. Watching football is also great too!
Unfortunately, none of this happened on Thanksgiving this year. Nevertheless, Thanksgiving was amazing! I cannot say enough about how impressed I was with all of the cooks in the house. Often my mom and my uncle cook together for the holidays and they both always do an amazing job, but I really believe that our turkey came out perfectly. Hilary had the amazingly difficult task of cooking the (still slightly frozen) turkey without a thermometer in our too small oven that has no temperature gauge. Despite these challenges I cannot imagine how the turkey could have tasted better.
Hilary also cooked a chocolate cake and a pumpkin pie. I love dessert! SO GOOD!
In addition to these desserts, I ate even more of what I actually thought the dessert was. Zak baked a large loaf of pumpkin bread that really tasted more like cake than any cake I have eaten in
What would be Thanksgiving without mashed potatoes and gravy? It would be lame…Fortunately for us Hilary also made an amazing batch of gravy from the turkey and John absolutely nailed the mashed potatoes. I don’t know how he did it, and I know I sound like a broken record, but they tasted perfect!
I am so happy to be living down here with such a great group of people (who really know how to cook) and I am really do feel thankful this Thanksgiving.
The Saturday following Thanksgiving we were treated to a special show. Danny Flores, an Ecuadorian that works with us in the after school program in
Danny’s principal contribution to the talent show was his direction of the theater piece. This was a hilarious comedy in which male and female gender roles were reversed. It starts off with the woman yelling at her husband because her breakfast is not yet ready. It then continues with the woman going off to the auto shop and fraternizing (sororitizing?) with her co-workers about how inferior men are. While the women are at work a pregnant man comes over for idle conversation with the husband. The show ends with the women going out, getting drunk, hitting on the hot waiter, and getting kicked out of the bar by the female owner. The woman then comes home and beats her husband because he asked her not to spend all the family’s money on booze and to try and save some for the kids. In the end, however, it was all a dream and the curtains close the next morning as the man is telling his wife to make her some breakfast.
What for me was the most terrifying performance was the local indigenous troupe dance. (Although for some reason no Ecuadorians seemed surprised). As the curtain opened there were about 12 little children dressed up in animal costumes, and one boy dressed as a hunter with a gun bigger than he. All the animals got up and started dancing: The birds flew, the chickens pecked, the bunnies hopped around, etc. It was all very adorable as they were bouncing around in circles, not really paying any attention to the hunter that was walking around. Until, all of a sudden, the animals surrounded the hunter. They closed in on him, took his gun, and took him down! While one bunny rabbit held the gun over his head in triumph five other little animals choked, kick, and beat the hunter. Afterwards, all the animals turned towards the audience and pumped their fist in victory. Meanwhile, however, the hunter is still lying on the ground and twitching! This, for me, was too much. The Ecuadorians, nevertheless, saw nothing strange or out of place in this scenario…
Apparently I am not as cultured as I hoped…
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