A German-Canadian American Thanksgiving

Two days ago, I left the Darden bubble to venture across the ocean to Munich, Germany, where my sister is living. Although I must admit that I DID work on cases today, it has been nice to be out of the bubble where all the jokes seem to centre around some sort of Darden class or business process.

When my sister's roommates discovered that, being Canadian, we don't typically celebrate Thanksgiving at this time of year, they were quite disappointed. However, since we'd both mostly missed Canadian Thanksgiving (second weekend in October), we figured we would share the traditions of a typical North American Thanksgiving meal... at least as well as we could with German ingredients and a small preparation time frame.

We substituted the traditional turkey for chickens (bought fresh from the grocery today, since there was no time to thaw anything!), and cooked mashed potatoes and gravy and added a pumpkin dish instead of pumpkin pie. (While we would have loved to cook pumpkin pie, it seems Pillsbury has not made it's mark here, and Mom was 8 hours behind and fast asleep and couldn't talk us through the pie-crust-making logistics.) For dessert, given that pie was not an option, we made banana loaf from the frozen bananas in my sister's freezer. It turned out that her roommates, unfamiliar with the concept of banana bread, were quite disturbed by the old bananas in the freezer. They were, however, quite pleased with the finished product and wondered how it could be called "bread" or "loaf," given how sweet it was.

Before beginning our feast, everyone went around and said what they were thankful for. Then we clinked our wine glasses together and said both "Cheers" and "Prosit!"

As for me... I'm thankful for the opportunity to be in a new country, interacting with new people. I didn't have much time to research the sights of Munich, but have been so glad for the opportunity to be living in a house with Germans, experiencing their culture. If I don't see the Hofbrauhaus, I will still feel like I got a good sense of Bavaria because of the opportunity to just be here with these people. They have been gracious enough to speak English as often as they remember, and smile politely as I attempt to brush off my high school German.

That said, the rest of this weekend will be filled with Marianplatz tours and visits to Dachau and the Hofbrauhaus and, most importantly, the Christmas markets. And hopefully some cover letter writing...