A Very Happy Thanksgiving!

A week after the Muslim holiday was Thanksgiving. So I put on my traveling clothes again, but this time just to Ankara. I got there on Wed. so I could skate on Thursday and Friday. I ended up only skating Thursday because I was soo sore! I stayed with a couple of the Fulbright girls at Brad’s, a foreign rep. in Turkey who deals a lot with us Fulbrighters. We had a mini Thanksgiving Thursday night with him and his family.

Then on Friday we went to have Thanksgiving with Martha, a US English Language Fellow, not officially affiliated with the Fulbright program, but has a tie to the one here in Turkey. She is somewhat of an advisor to us who have problems or need help, especially with teaching. She’s great fun and has a little apartment in Ankara that is open to us whenever we need it. I used it one weekend when I wanted to go to Ankara just to skate. So nice!

She was putting on a Thanksgiving for the people she works with. It was a rather formal event and she wanted everything perfect, so I helped J Coming from the hospitality industry, my secret when I am with academics hehe, I knew exactly how to handle the table set ups and oversaw that it was nice! That was fun. There were some funny parts about the meal cuz they served the dessert with the salads! This led to some people mistakenly eating ONLY pie for Thanksgiving dinner. I think it was an overall success for Martha.

The next day we had Thanksgiving for all the local Fulbrighters back at Brad’s place. The three girls, Hayfa, Rachel,Natasha and I were busy busy bees in the kitchen all day. It was so nice to be able to use a fully equipped kitchen to create fun holiday things. We baked lots of pie, helped out with the side dishes, and prepared the house for a lot of guests. Finally when everyone arrived, it was like the family had come home. So many hugs and SO much food oh and there was wine J. We had a great time with stories and eating and even some dancing hehe…I think that came from the wine. After the dinner a lot of us went out and that was a good time. It was sad to leave everyone, but Christmas wasn’t too far away.