thanksgiving!

Okay, this is a quick post, hopefully I'll get more up later. Things are going well still here in Japan. We had a thanksgiving here in my apartment building yesterday, about 7 Americans and 7 Australians. I made three pumpkin pies in a medium sized toaster oven. I would say they were alright. They were really good considering I hadn't tried out the internet recipies before, and I worked with very basic ingredients, no crisco, baking soda or powder, lard, etc.

Also, Julian, Taube, and Mac deepfried a turkey and made stuffing (I was told they were good). Taube made a vast amount of mashed potatoes. Other people pitched in veggies, salad, fried Japanese potatoey things, wine, juice, cranberries, and corn. Oh yeah, and Mac made some delicious homemade soda bread. Gayleen made these cheesecake pie, the filling was really good. There were a bunch more meat dishes, but I didn't really pay a whole lot of attention to those...
Everyone did an awesome job cooking!

We had a little "what we're thankful for" discussion before dinner. It seemed really wrong to be doing that without Gramma leading the table and asking us all to reflect on how fortunate we are. Also, Although we managed to find 15 matching plates, we did not have a dish for every course, the salad, the butter, and so on. It was rather bizarre not to be digging out the family china and trying to figure out what all the different dishes are for.
Half the group, from left: Terry, Izzy, Karin, Bridgette, Mac, Steph, Gayleen (cut out), Lexi, Me. Not pictured: Julian, Taube, John, Kyoki, Peter, Adrian.

Hugs to my family and friends back home. Although we did an awesome job pulling this off and I love the people here, I am most thankful for the people back home. I'm thinking of you all, have a good thanksgiving and give me a call!