Thanksgiving Dinner

Last night I had the good fortune of dining at La Embajada de Gringolandia. That is, the house of a family from Boston that lives just down the road from my school.  The mother, Lisa, has been working at another Castro school through the same English Opens Doors program since last August; the dad, Mike, who works in a lab doing neuro-sciency complex things, got the okay to work from home for a year while living here; and their two kids, 6-year-old Roberto and 2-year-old Gabby, go to local schools/preschools here in town.  Since they've been here since last year, they will be leaving Castro at the end of the month.

As they won't be here in November, they invited me over to have a Thanksgiving meal yesterday.  I get out of school at 1 on Fridays, so I wandered over to their place and spent the afternoon running errands in town with them and keeping the kids out of their hair as they prepared dinner.  We were joined for dinner by Roberto's play date and the boy's mom.  The food was amazing: delicious chicken (in lieu of turkey), stuffing with chestnuts, baked potatoes and veggies, and for desert we had Mike's squash pie and a rhubarb pastry my host mom happened to have baked earlier this week.  Between the chilly weather and the American-style food, it genuinely felt like a November weekend.  All that was missing was a Detroit Lions game.

Click here for pictures from the dinner (and pictures of my host family).

I'm finally uploading other albums from the last few weeks Facebook this weekend, here are the links:

A few weeks back I went to Puerto Montt for a meeting with my program.  I spent the next day at the family home of Julio, my co-regional coordinator for the program.  The house is in a countryside village near the town of Maullin.  For a recap on the delicious home-made everything they fed me, check out the third paragraph of this post.

Here are the pics from Julio's house.

Here are the pics from the Navy Day Parade mentioned in the last post.

Soon I'll blog about the curanto you see in the Thanksgiving album, as well as some more a general thoughts on life in Chile.  For now, since its dark, gloomy, and rainy out (after a week of just beautiful weather), I'll be rotting away in bed watching Denzel Washington flicks.

-Paul