The ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers) gathered together one night and had a thanksgiving. We had corn, stuffing, candied yams, rolls, mashed potatoes, and instead of turkey we had some good chicken of various flavors (including a BBQ Jerk sauce that was off the hook.)
The end we had some good desserts, including mine, but we were too stuffed to eat any.
Then I had a smaller thanksgiving with just myself and Hilary. My father sent me the following things...
Corn bread mix, stuffing ingredients, pumpkin pie mix (not in the picture...) gravy, cranberries, and some other goodies... oh yeah... that's right a TURKEY. A ROAST TURKEY. He couldn't mail an actual turkey from America so he sent me one from a company within Japan that mails frozen roast turkeys. Turkey is really difficult to come by here, in fact, when I talk about turkey to my students none of them even know what a turkey looks like.
I'm convinced this is where everyone decided to "one-up" each other. To see who could send the most raw food to me...
Following this delicious dinner I was sent a big box of goodies from my mother and little sister.
As a joke, when asked what I want for Hanukkah, I told my sister that I wanted a Challah (the bread... mmm...) of course you can't just MAIL Challah, I thought. Then I received one in mail, I was totally wrong. It was delicious.
My mother surprised me with two other packages one including dry and canned spices for Mexican food including pickled jalapenos, canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, and an assortment of dried chiles.
The second box she sent me had (though this may have been illegal) raw peppers and vegetables. There were about 8 jalapenos, 8 serranos, 4 poblanos, and 8 tomatillos. It was wonderous. TRULY wonderous. I'd had tomatillos in food before but had never tasted one on it's own before... it's gooooooood.
The final gift my mother gave me was a transfer of all of our family and childhood VHS tapes onto DVD. It's an incredible thing to see these videos. I found that the earliest memories I have come from late 1989. I have short memories of thanksgiving at my Grandma Mary's home in Connecticut. I thought these memories were from the early 90s but the videos confirmed it to be 1989. They are great memories. Especially the ones of my awkward preteen-early teen chubby self running around trying to hard to be funny... aaaaawkward.
The gifts kept coming, though! I recieved a surprise gift from my aunt and uncle! A t-shirt guitar. Yep! A T-shit that has a guitar drawn on it and when you wave a magnetic pic in front of
it, it actually plays guitar chords. A fun gift that I will surely have to wear to school one day to make my students think I'm stranger than they already do.
I also got TWO, yep, TWO donations made in my name! One is to the Frontera Farmer Foundation and one to http://www.whatididnotbuy.org/ both are really interesting places so please check them out!
That's my update on the holidays so far! I will be taking a trip to (on an over-night train) to Osaka in a few weeks. Stay tuned for an update!
1 comment:
Being thousands of miles away does have benefits. Everyone misses you so much you get lots of cool stuff.
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