Thanksgiving

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Happy Belated Thanksgiving to you all! We hope you all enjoyed a warm, happy and delicious day.

Our first Thanksgiving in Romania was a distinct pleasure celebrated with 35 new found friends at a cabana in the mountains. We missed you all and are thankful for your thoughts, emails, and support.

Thursday, the Turkey Day itself, we traveled from home to Arad (30 km from the Hungarian border and home to several hundred thousand) and Friday out to Hasmash (pronounced Hah-shMahsh) where one Alecia’s program colleagues lives (size 1,200). Needless to say, the Peace Corps people in both of these towns are having significantly different experiences than we our! Arad is a bustling investment center with miles of old Hungarian architecture and a famous ‘strand’ (a.k.a. summer-time swimming pool/adult playground). Known for its lack of clothing, we were sadly disappointed to arrive in the winter time.

Hashmash on the other hand, our home for the next few days, was welcoming and within minutes of our arrival we were being fed mutton stew while we waited for the haggling over the rides to the cabana to come to a close. Kenny, the PCV in Hashmash showed up to collect us when it was time to load the truck with supplies for the weekend and was promptly handed his laundry (his host mom won’t let him do his own). Before he could take he was scolded about mismatched socks and not having a bag to put it in. Kenny is 50…good to know he is taken care of.

Once we found our ride, we piled into the truck and headed for the hills. Tragically, for the sheep, our truck did not have breaks (news to us!) and we suffered a loss upon the way. Let me tell you, it is unpleasant to wake up from a brief snooze to shouts of STOP STOP STOP and see a heard of sheep in the headlights. We seemed to get over it soon enough as jokes about ‘Romanian undercarriage cleaning’ and ‘where is a sheep when you need one’ filled the cabin as we whisked up mountain roads. Our hats off to the sheep. And the turkeys - - the slightly more planned victims of the weekend. Two turkeys, 25 kg each! Or for ye non-metric speakers that is 50 lbs - each! They were delicious. Kenny tried to fry one which was a treat. He had two large containers of peanut oil he had procured from some slightly suspicious source. Unfortunately the peanut oil was slightly suspicious as well arriving in gelatinous form...It did fry the turkeys but took a lot of convincing. Other culinary highlights included rabbit soup, rabbit chili, rabbit liver (Kenny’s gazda raises rabbits) stuffing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, apple pie, cookies, green bean salad and a generally, thoroughly over indulgent experience.

Other weekend highlights included walking in the hills, silent nights, campfires, warm weather, and getting up at 3:45 a.m. for the trip home on Monday. Ahh well…

We are home and back to work. Hope you all are well.

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Comments

[Maraty]

I'm glad you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration in the hills of Romania :) What wonderful smorgasbord you had! I'm expecting you to cook up a tasty Romanian meal for us when you get back! How are your individual projects going? We miss you! Much love, Maraty