Monday October 11, 2010

Monday morning Sam and Linds had to get up around 6:30, and I got up around 7. They didn’t leave until 8, which was nice that I at least got to spend a little bit more time with them. We discussed the prospect of my staying another semester, and although I think I know what the right decision is, I’m still not entirely certain it’s what I want. On the other hand, there really is no right or wrong decision, this is one of those gray areas that doesn’t really have an answer. Anyway, once they left Dani and I made our grocery list and headed to the store in the pouring rain. Some people thought we were insane for still attempting to host Thanksgiving, but we thought it was well worth it. Upon returning from the store I read over my paper again to make sure it was ok and then proceeded to start preparing stuff for Thanksgiving. Since we’re in Australia and they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, we had to make some substitutions on some stereotypical Thanksgiving foods. For one thing, they don’t sell canned pumpkin, so we couldn’t make pumpkin pie. Instead I just made two apple pies using CLC’s amazing recipe. They also don’t sell anything but frozen turkeys and we didn’t have time to thaw a turkey, nor could anyone spend the day watching it. So instead we substituted premade chicken, which personally, I think chicken and turkey taste pretty similar, so I was ok with it. Besides it took a huge stress off of Dani and I. Around 12:30 I had to go to campus to hand in my paper and go to class, so I was only able to prepare the apples for the apple pie prior to leaving for class. Class itself was fairly interesting, we discussed Native Americans for a little while and related the way we treat our Natives to the way they treat their Aboriginals. Like I said it was actually pretty interesting, and brought to my attention the fact that our schools neglect to really teach us about Native Americans. It made me feel like in America we go with the concept ignorance is bliss. If most citizens don’t know about the wars and history of the Native Americans then we won’t judge them, and hopefully vice versa. Quite frankly, it upset me to realize that we know so little about our natives. It also made me realize how segregated they are from us. I have never really met a Native American, which when you think about it, is really strange. Sometimes it’s pretty scary to think how little we know about things. It was also kind of ironic to have this discussion on the day that we were celebrating Thanksgiving. Speaking of which, once I got out of class, I had to kind of rush to get everything together so that we could actually eat that night. On the bright side Dani and I had a lot of help from some really great friends. We held the actual celebration at our friends Erin and Augie’s house. They live just down the street, but they have a much nicer house and a much bigger/better kitchen. We ended up cooking the pies in their oven because we needed our oven to cook potatoes. At our other friends’ house they cooked the green beans and some potatoes for us, and we made the sweet potatoes and some of the mashed potatoes. I must say, I never realized just how much work cooking all this stuff is. Granted we cheated on a lot of foods due to limited time, but it was fun getting to cook with everyone and just having everyone come together for a big family dinner. We ended up eating around 7:30, which personally I thought was the perfect time. There were 18 people that came and it seemed like everyone had a great time. Dani and I definitely felt proud of ourselves for our estimates on how much food we would need and for just pulling off the whole thing in general. Like I said, it was great night with great friends. It was also a great celebration for me for finally being done with the obscene amount of work I had had the past week. From that point out it’s pretty smooth sailing for me. A bunch of us hung around Erin and Augie’s house until 11 or 12, at which point we were pretty tired and headed home to get some sleep.