Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances sometimes arise, and I was not able to blog about Thanksgiving as soon as I'd planned too, so I'm doing it now, a little after the fact.
Liesl and I had already invited John and Robin, our hosts and distant neighbors, and Jill and Martin, our across-the-courtyard neighbors, to Thanksgiving a while before we'd gone to Dublin. When we returned, we went shopping for ingredients, found the recipes that we needed, and cleaned and rearranged our house. We spent a few hours cooking on Thanksgiving, and it was actually kind of stressful, though I think this was exacerbated by the fact that our lives here are so strangely free of the stresses of everyday life. But, for the most part, everything worked out in the end.
I think that Thanksgiving is great. A holiday based on gratitude and food? Um, yes. Now I know that if we look at it historically we see a union between the settlers and the immigrants that seems laughably pathetic in lieu of the fact that the colonists soon proceeded to massacre Native Americans after this. I'm a little fuzzy on American history--I was bored to death by it during school, for the most part--but I do know for sure that at some point after Thanksgiving, the relationship between the settlers and the natives was distinctly less than harmonious. But anyway, it's still nice to have a holiday about thankfulness.
Everything we made was vegan, except one dish that was just vegetarian. We could see that our neighbors were a bit apprehensive about eating a vegetarian Thanksgiving meal, but they sportingly tried our paradoxically unusual and traditional food. We had pumpkin pie, apple pie, mashed potatoes, corn casserole, etc.
It was interesting celebrating an American holiday in another country with people that are not Americans. Well, actually Robin is orginially from the US, and she's had Thanksgiving here before, but she wasn't planning on doing it this year.
This is all of us except for John, who is taking the picture.
The meal was very delicious and our guests seemed to enjoy it too. But possibly the highlight of Thanksgiving for Liesl and I was the social aspect. Our neighbors are very nice, and it was so thoroughly enjoyable just to converse with other human beings. Martin told us of some very interesting and bizarre pagan celebrations that take place in various small towns in England, most of which seemed to be of unknown origin and which included dressing up in strange attire and spending most of the day dancing.
We primarily ate Thanksgiving leftovers for the next few days.
One morning, shortly after Thanksgiving, I awoke and went out into our living room and glanced out the window. Everything was covered in white. Amazed, I looked more closely to see that it was actually frost and not snow. However, this was still very exciting for me, so I quickly went outside to check it out.
Everything was coated in frost. The grass crunched under my shoes, and I left distinct green tracks across the lawns.
On a sudden inspiration, I trudged over to the side of the lake to find that the body of water was in fact, somewhat frozen. Sheets of ice covered it, making it look white in the places where it was thickest. I'm not sure if the whole thing had ice on it or not, but sadly, it definitely would have held the weight of a person.
There are two swans that live in the lake. Have I mentioned that before?
Per my recommendation, Liesl went out to look at the frost when she woke up as well. She found some puddles that were frozen, where you could break off a chunk of ice and throw it onto a larger frozen puddle and watch it shatter spectacularly.
From this point on--and actually long before this for me--we have wanted it to snow here, and the lake to freeze properly, with a burning passion. Unfortunately, it normally doesn't snow here or in England until January, so in all likeliness we will miss out on the snow. Which makes me very, very upset. I hope that England has snow in April.
This brings us to an important point, an announcement really, which is that Liesl will be returning to the US in April, and I will be continuing on to England for the months of April and May. My friend Melody may join me in May. The reasons for Liesl's early departure are mostly financial, though she is also excited to go back to San Diego and see her friends and family sooner than May. India is the part of this trip that she is most excited about, so she'll be leaving right after our stay in India. I'm actually kind of excited to have a short solo trip, I think it'll be fun.
Also, thanks to Mark, Liesl not only has her flight back to the US booked, but we both have a flight to London for December 19th and our India visas! It's going to be so exciting spending Christmas in London.
This is what many of the trees in Ireland look like without leaves.
Liesl thinks they look like lungs; they do, they look like the bronchioles. A very fitting metaphor for a tree, really, a lung. They do look animate, the trees. I think they look as though they were thrashing around like the Whomping Willow in Harry Potter, but got frozen into place.
Up next: our recent trip to Belfast.
Cheers,
Stephanie
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