"Thanksgiving was never meant to be shut up in a single day." - Robert Caspar Lintner

Thankfully, (no pun intended) I had the chance to talk to some of you about my holidays, but for those of you who I haven’t talked to personally, time to update.  Let’s rewind a month and talk about Thanksgiving.  My roommates and I decided that we would attempt the most traditional Thanksgiving dinner possible under the circumstances.  So what was on the menu? Cheesy potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, broccoli casserole, biscuits, and a red velvet cake for dessert. Unfortunately, (or fortunately for me) our oven is much too small to cook a turkey so we got a couple of rotisserie chickens to substitute.  I didn’t mind this one bit seeing as I don’t even really like turkey.  Sounds pretty basic right….wrong.  Here are just a few of the challenges we ran into.  The broccoli casserole was my dish.  That turned out to be the easiest because the only ingredient I had to substitute was cheddar for Velveeta cheese, no big deal. (I was shocked that I found Ritz crackers, though!)  The cheesy potatoes were made by my friend Hayley.  Two challenges:  1) You can’t just buy a big bag of frozen hash brown potatoes, so they were all cut and cooked by hand. 2) Sour cream does not exist in Spain, so she used plain yogurt.  Next, my other roommate Mary decided to do the green bean casserole with, again, two challenges:  1)No Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup.  (we later found out that they do sell it at one store, but it was too late by that time) So, she had to use this powdered soup and it took us a couple times to get the consistency right.  2)  No French fried onions – the key ingredient.  However, this was a blessing in disguise because she ended up frying onions in corn flakes, and they were absolutely delicious.  Lastly, don’t even get me started on the red velvet cake because that was a HUGE pain in the butt.  I had to go to about 4 different supermarkets and spend way too much money to find all of the ingredients.  The red food coloring was really weak, even with two bottles, so the cake turned out this weird mauve color, and I couldn’t find buttermilk, so I made my own.  Yes, I made my own buttermilk, be impressed.  On top of that, they don’t sell frosting, so I had to make that from scratch too.  Oh, so in case you try to contact me, I’ve changed my name to Betty Crocker.  So after slaving away in the kitchen all day with my roommates, I now know what all you parents go through every Thanksgiving and I appreciate it so much more.  I will say, the hard worked definitely paid off.  We had a few Spanish friends over, as well, to show them a real American Thanksgiving, and everything tasted sooooo good.  I couldn’t find my camera that day on account of my room being a pig sty, so here are some pictures my roommate, Hayley, took of our quaint little Thanksgiving away from home.

Me with the food - haven't even had time to take off the oven mitts!

Creepy pterodactyl shaped bone I pulled out of the chicken after "carving" it.

 

Bon Apetit! I took a page out of my Dad's book and served myself last : )

Everyone at the table, ready to eat!

And the grand finale!

So there ya have it.  And although our dinner was really great and so was the company, I still missed home like crazy.  I was able to skype with some of you for a little while, but the connection was terrible.  I was so frustrated by the end of the conversation that when I hung up I started crying. Not to worry though, just a wave of homesickness, but I realized that I have a lot to be thankful for on both side of the Atlantic so I let it all out and regrouped.  Next post will be a little out of order, because I'm going to post Christmas stuff, then Amsterdam.  Stay tuned!

A picture is worth a thousand words...

First of all, sorry for being M.I.A. for about a month.  Things have started to get pretty busy here and I’ve neglected my blog posting as a result.  I will do my best to get you all up to speed starting with my trip to Lagos, Portugal.  My roommates and I took a long weekend trip to Lagos during Halloween weekend.  I could sit here and write page upon page about this particular trip, but I will keep the words to a minimum because is this case the pictures will do most of the talking. Lagos is a small international beach town in the south-western corner of Portugal.  It seems you can walk the whole width of the town in about 15 minutes and for some reason, I felt really at home there.  Because they have so much tourism, pretty much everyone speaks English, so we were able to get by without speaking a word of Portuguese.  This was a relief, but also very humbling.  I feel very spoiled that I can travel just about anywhere and get by because I speak English.   

Another great thing about Lagos is how cheap everything was.  First off, the hostel we stayed in was the best I’ve ever stayed in.  It had free breakfast, linens, towels, and internet.  We had our own bathroom in our room as well as personal safes to put our valuables, and everything was really clean and secure.  Not to mention is was in a perfect location – walking distance to everything! Total cost: 36 euros per person for 4 nights.  Unbelievable.  Eating and drinking was also extremely cheap there, and they have amazing food.  Because there is such an international atmosphere there, they have so many different kinds of restaurants and they’re all amazing.  One afternoon we went to a tiny diner that prepares American style breakfasts – something we’d all been craving.  I got eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, and a giant pancake all for 3 euro.  Ridiculous!  My stomach didn’t particularly enjoy this meal, but I sure did!

One thing Lagos is not lacking is beaches.  I think we made it to a beach at least once a day while we were there.  Lagos is lined with skyscraping cliffs that separate the coastline into small intimate beaches, each one more beautiful than the last.  On Sunday afternoon, we took a little boat tour along the coast line and into the cave areas.  I got a little seasick even with the Dramamine, but I managed to enjoy they tour and keep my breakfast down.  Win-win. 

Here are some pictures from the boat tour:

Monday we had planned a day trip to Cabo San Vicente in another small town called Sagres.  Cabo San Vicente (or Cape St. Vincent in English) is known as the “end of the world” because it is the south-westernmost point of Europe and people thought it was where the world ended.  Ya know, back when people thought the world was flat.  So we took the bus from Lagos to Sagres which took about an hour.  Poor planning on our part, we didn’t know exactly how far Cabo San Vicente was from Sagres or how far we would actually get there.  So when we got there we tried to walk around and find some signs to no avail.  Finally we walked into a gas station to find out that it would have probably taken us over an hour to walk there.  The man who worked at the gas station must have read the “what the bleep to we do now” looks on our faces and says to us “don’t worry,” summons his daughter from the back of his store, and tells us “she will drive you.”  Now to some of you this may sound shady, but this kind of hospitality, even among strangers, is actually very typical in Europe.  Now before you think, “but haven’t you seen that movie Taken???” And yes, I have.  And no, it does not make me afraid of Europe.  It’s just a movie.  So this man had his daughter drive us to the point without asking for a thing in return.  He did make it clear we were on our own when it came time to come back, but we all decided we’d cross that bridge when the time comes.  When we arrived at Cabo San Vicente, we knew we were in the right place because there we quite a few other tourists there, but it wasn’t too crowded because the weather wasn’t that great. We got lucky though because although it was cloudy and windy, we had the sun break through every once in a while which made the views from the cliffs absolutely breathtaking.  We walked around for a while taking it all in and taking a lot of pictures.  Then we saw a bus pull up, and the light bulbs went off.  We weren’t really sure where this bus was going, but we asked the driver if we could get on here and get off in Sagres and he said yes.  So we were able to take that bus right back to the other bus we needed to get on to get back to Lagos.  All in all is was a really successful day trip.

Me by the cliffs at "the end of the world"

Ok one more fun story about Lagos and then I’ll be done (so much for keeping it short).  There was a restaurant right by our hostel called Casa Rosa that had a deal called the power hour and for 12 euro, you got a meal and all the beer or wine you could drink in an hour.  My roommates and I decided to do it one night at 9 o’clock. The food was really great, and let’s just say we drank more than our money’s worth of beer. The cool thing about it was you didn’t have to finish your beer at the last minute, so we got one last beer right before 10 and stayed for about another hour sipping on our beers and laughing our asses off at absolutely nothing.  So it was about 11 by the time we left and I was trying to get my roommates to stay out for the night.  I mean we were already pretty drunk and I figured it would be a waste to go back to our hostel so early.  One of my roommates wanted to stop back and go to the bathroom, but I knew if we went back to the hostel, everyone would get in bed and that would be the end. And that’s exactly what happened. Luckily, since I’ve assumed the role of rallying my roommates to party, I set an alarm for 2am and miraculously managed to get them all back out of bed and back out to the bars with me.  A good time was had by all, haha.  Ok that’s it for Lagos, now I’ll work on getting you updated on my life in Spain! 

Here are some more pictures just for fun:

My roomies and I just climbing some rocks.

Getting into some precarious positions... anything for a good picture, right?

Our boat guide pointed out to us in sort of English that the side of this cliff was Michael Jackson.  If you look right in the middle you will see some kind of weird face with no nose.