I've Got Plenty to Be Thankful For: Thanksgiving in Spain

Celebrating Thanksgiving outside of the U.S. was an odd but memorable experience. Certain elements were missing such as watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, eating cranberry sauce and carrot cake, and being surrounded by family. The strangest thing about this holiday though was that since it’s strictly American, there was no sense of a holiday here in Spain. It’s easy to forget it’s Thanksgiving when here it’s just another Thursday and everyone is continuing about their business as usual. I don’t think I wished anyone Happy Thanksgiving until the day was already half over because I hadn’t been around a fellow American until then. I tried explaining cranberry jello salad to one of the teachers at the school where I work and she thought the concept was extremely strange. Jello isn’t that big over here and if people do make it, it’s just straight up jello and in a mold, so adding stuff to it and calling it a salad is really weird for them. All I can say is they’re missing out. I attempted to make the salad for the Thanksgiving dinner that we hosted at our flat but it wasn’t quite up to par because I had to substitute cranberry juice for the water in order to get a little bit of cranberry flavor rather than back home putting actual cranberry sauce in the salad. It was better than nothing though. We had quite a big dinner with three countries represented. Three of us from the states, eleven from France and one from Britain. Thanks to the efforts of my lovely flatmate, Cecilia, we had turkey (the ham-sized format to fit in our toaster oven), stuffing, green beans and pumpkin pie. I contributed the jello salad of sorts, and my arm for mixing the heavy whipping cream. We had wine, bread and cake from our French friends, and mashed potatoes and gravy completed the spread thanks to an American/British collaboration. We ate around 10pm and managed to fit everyone around our table with a little bit of chair sharing involved. Everything was delicious and while not exactly the same as the Thanksgiving meal back home, it helped make the day actually feel like our American holiday. 

 Gotta love Thanksgiving leftovers

Other than Thanksgiving, not too much of note happened this week. I went to school and worked at my nanny-speaking job. With the two girls at my second job, we made hand turkeys and talked about Thanksgiving so that was pretty fun. I showed them a clip of Santa Claus at the end of the Thanksgiving parade and then they wanted to listen to the song “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” over and over again. I’m having a slightly difficult time keeping them focused during our lessons because they love watching videos on my laptop and so after I show them one song that goes along with what we’re working on, they want to keep watching other videos. Also they both have these similar to iPad devices and the younger one started crying when her’s stopped working and I had to spend about ten or more minutes trying to distract her from this tragedy. Technology can  often provide helpful resources, but it is also a bit of a pain sometimes. 

My hand turkey example

To practice my Spanish I’ve been meeting up with two Spaniards (María and Pilar) weekly and we do a language exchange. Usually we’ve been going to cafes and talking for around three hours each time, but last week for a change, I visited the Museum of Science and Water with María. We saw some turtles, fish, insects and a lot of exhibits geared towards kids and also viewed a presentation in the planetarium. It ended up being just us and the man giving the presentation so that meant we were on a first-name basis and we had to answer (at least attempt) all the questions he posed. Thankfully María did most of the answering since my Spanish vocabulary when it comes to planets and space is rather limited. We got to learn about a bunch of constellations and see what the sky looks like at different times of the night and since it was just us two, our host showed us what the sky looked like the day and year we were born. I have to say that I never would have had that memorable experience if I wasn’t friends with a Spaniard who knows about such places. 

On Saturday (yesterday at the time of this post) we had a flatmate bonding day and went to see The Hunger Games: Mockingjay or in Spanish Los Juegos del Hambre: Sinsajo. I had originally been adamant that I wouldn’t see it in Spanish, knowing that it would be super hard to listen to Spanish voices in the dubbed version, instead of the actors I’m familiar with. But when all my flatmates decided to go, I couldn’t be the only one missing out, so I hoped for the best and joined them. It actually wasn’t as bad as I was expecting and after a little while into the movie it was easy to adjust to the new voices. The only part where the dubbed version really bothered me was during a song that the main character sang and according to some reviews it was a super moving part of the film, but in Spanish it was kind of a fail. What was supposed to be a somber and moving moment, instead had me attempting to hold in a laugh and that was a fail as well. I even heard some of the Spaniards laughing, so the song just didn’t carry over well in the dubbed version. After the movie we had a late supper at a new thai restaurant across the street from where we live that was super classy and had live piano accompaniment. Then we ended the night with hot cocoa, marshmallows and heavy whipping cream leftover from Thanksgiving. Overall I’d say it was a pretty good week.