Thanksgiving Shenanigans

Happy belated Thanksgiving wishes to everyone; I hope you all got to spend time with your loved ones and stuff yourselves silly. I had a full and fun Thanksgiving break. We were lucky enough to have Thursday and Friday off from school. Thursday I did nothing all day except go shopping for feast supplies. I was disappointed to learn that they were all out of turkeys at the OK Hypermarket (literally, they’d sold out. Guess all the other Americans in Piter beat me to the punch). But I got a chicken instead, which was more appropriately sized for my family anyway. Friday I went to the American Councils Thanksgiving Feast, which ended up being about five of us from Flagship plus Zhenya, one of our awesome tutors, a few very young Russians who studied abroad in the US last year, and the American Councils staff (also Russians, except the director). We had KFC. I ate a chicken breast. Can you believe it? Nearly five years of pretty solid vegetarianism, and the first chicken I eat is KFC. Good grief. Anyway, after the feast the Flagship guys, me, and Zhenya went to play pool. Kennon kicked all of our butts. It was so fun, I think it should become a new Thanksgiving tradition. Thanksgiving pool. Yeah.

Saturday the fun began at home. I cooked all day, making pumpkin pie, that potato casserole with the frosted flakes on top, roast chicken, turkey breasts (Galya found them and insisted on adding them to the feast, so that everything would be done right. What a sweetie!), stuffing, and deviled eggs. Everything turned out a little… Russian. For example, I had to use butter to make the pie crust, and make the pie in a springform pan instead of a regular pie pan, so when I put the pie in the oven, some of the crust melted off and the apartment was filled with smoke from burning crust all day. Oops. Also, the pumpkin was not the convenient pureed stuff you get in the can, but an actual gourd. It didn’t puree as well as I’d have liked (Galya’s blender, while it looks pretty fancy, is actually pretty wimpy), so the consistency was a little off. But hey, we had pumpkin pie! For the potato casserole I had to approximate my own cream of mushroom soup (Galya insisted on adding more mushrooms than I really wanted, all the time saying “but they’re tiny, you need more of them”), and I ended up not baking it long enough, so the potatoes were just a hair on the crunchy side. Meh, it was still tasty. Besides, what are you supposed to do when the oven settings are labeled 1 through 8 rather than with actual temperatures? Even Galya’s recipes are given for “hot” “medium” and “low” oven. Sheesh. The stuffing, however, turned out splendidly.

Galya and I were joined by Kira, Nadya, and Galya’s daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. Adding the Russian tradition of toasting at meals, we all raised our shot-glasses of home-brewed rowan berry vodka and took turns saying what we were thankful for. Zhenya, the always inquisitive son-in-law, kept asking, “So, you’re giving thanks to the Indians, right?” With Kira present, he had a new American to grill, so Kira spent a lot of time answering questions about earthquakes in California (where she’s from), whether people wear sombreros in California, and about her impressions of Petersburg and Russian people. Zhenya’s reaction to the pumpkin pie also cracked me up: he said that as long as he didn’t think about the fact that it was pumpkin, it was very delicious – but the idea of a pie made from a vegetable freaked him out.

In all I had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. I’ve got a few pictures up here if you’d like to see the feast for yourself.

I haven’t been updating the blog of late because I’ve been feeling very overwhelmed by everything I have going on here. I haven’t been sleeping much, but I can’t seem to get anything done either. I’m finding it much more “important” to go to the movies with Nadya or to concerts at the brand new Marinsky Concert Hall with Jay. The lack of sunlight is really depressing; I’m in school literally from dawn to dusk. Yesterday I ended up not going to class because I was so exhausted; I slept till 2, then slept another 8 hours last night straight through. I’m feeling a lot better today. I have finals next week; Monday the 15th I have to give a presentation on my elective course (which I haven’t finished writing yet), and on the 16th and 17th we have language testing. Blargh. Just gotta hold out for a couple more weeks, then I’ll have three weeks off.