Thanksgiving in Nepal

For the last couple of weeks my colleagues here in Nepal have asked me about Thanksgiving, mostly wondering about the activities that take place on the holiday. I summarized it by saying that families get together, cook a lot of food, eat a lot of food, watch a lot of American football, sometimes play football either in the street or in a park, and then sit around and exchange family gossip while digesting the food and watching the football. Then after a quick night sleep everybody goes shopping for Christmas.

And yes, I do have to qualify "football" here as American football instead of soccer.

I was also asked a lot about what food we eat on Thanksgiving, and I named off all the foods I could think of, including turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing (which I then had to describe), sweet potatoes/yams, cranberries, salad, and last but not least pumpkin pie for desert.

After describing Thanksgiving to them 2 of my colleagues invited me to join them for dinner Thanksgiving night to celebrate the holiday. They looked but couldn't find a place that had turkey, but they still selected a nice restaurant. At first I thought it would just be the 3 of us but to my pleasant surprise word got out to the entire office about the dinner and we had a party of 9.

 Instead of turkey I had steak with mashed potatoes, my first taste of beef in 5-1/2 weeks. I wasn't sure about this at first but I was told that the steak at this restaurant was actually good, and indeed it was.

The best part was the pumpkin pie for desert. The restaurant didn't have this so 1 of my colleagues called around the different bakeries around town and found one that could bake a pie for us. The bakery was on the other side of town so before the dinner he went to the bakery on his motorbike, picked up the pie, and brought it to the restaurant. I am still amazed, honored, and yes thankful for the effort that he made to get the pie. Never has anyone made such an effort just so that I could have pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving.

The evening concluded with some impromptu singing, both American songs and Nepali ones. Since I am a lousy singer I instead kept the rhythm for them by thumping on the table. I actually got a couple of compliments on my rhythm skills, though they paled in comparison to the skills of our singers.

When I planned this trip I knew that I would miss Thanksgiving with my family, and I wasn't sure how sad and homesick I would be when the holiday came. As it turned out, this Thanksgiving will be one of my most memorable thanks to my colleagues. They really went above and beyond the call. For that and for them I am truly thankful.