I know I said yesterday that I wouldn’t be writing for a while. I lied. The truth is that writing blogs is so entertaining that I decided to write another. It’s a guilt-free form of procrastination: I’m writing, so it feels like school, but it’s fun, and therefore infinitely preferable to exams and essays. So let’s flash back a few weeks to an event that I have been meaning to write about for ages: Thanksgiving (more lengthily referred to here as Día de acción de gracias).

You can’t fully appreciate how truly American this holiday is until you are standing in a Chilean supermarket, shopping list in hand, realizing that you can’t find more than half the items that you need for your traditional dinner.

I had always believed that Bigger, the size of a Safeway or Albertsons at home, had everything you could possibly need…until the six of us from our program tried to look for pie tins, cranberries, pumpkin filling, swiss cheese, and chicken broth (among other things). I was pretty nervous to think that the next day, six exchange students with almost no cooking experience would be preparing a meal (a Thanksgiving meal, with all the enormous quantities of food that invariably come with the name) for thirteen people and would be improvising with half the ingredients. It seemed like a recipe for disaster.

We gathered at Alex’s home on Sunday morning and invaded his family’s kitchen, cooking all morning before our guests arrived in the late afternoon. Making these dishes for the first time, I learned some interesting information about what actually goes into some of my favorite Thanksgiving foods, and all gained a profound respect for my mother’s efforts to make this meal ever year. The end result of our day’s labor was a potential feast (assuming the food was edible): turkey, gravy, stuffing, salad, beets, spinach quiche, and mashed potatoes. For dessert: apple pie, ice cream, and fruit salad.

When all of our guests had assembled, we explained a bit about the holiday and the traditional foods before sitting down to eat outside to enjoy a gorgeous spring day. The cooks held their breaths as everyone took their first bites, but the Chileans all proclaimed the food delicious and, seeing that none of our guests died that day or within the following week, I think we can claim the meal a success! The apple pie was a HUGE hit for dessert, and everyone left the table feeling appropriately stuffed.

Under a blue, sunny sky, watching as our assembled friends chatted and ate, I felt incredibly thankful, not just for the food we had prepared, but for the opportunity to share these traditions with the community we had created for ourselves here. And I was also thankful for the tears and the incredible homesickness that welled up thinking about my family half a world away, because they showed me that I am finally learning to appreciate how unbelievably blessed I am in the people I left behind. How lucky to know that that same community has always supported me and will always be waiting to welcome me home!

In a lot of ways, you could say that our Chilean Thanksgiving was the perfect metaphor for my experience here this first semester: arriving without any sense of what the “ingredients” were, searching unsuccessfully for all the things I had left in the U.S. and trying to replicate the world I had known before, when replication was impossible. In the end, you improvise and you realize that, in many ways, plum sauce is just as good as cranberry sauce and, though you had to abandon the pumpkin pie, it will be waiting for you next year. Though it may be difficult at times, you can still build a life and a community for yourself amongst strangers — beautiful in spite of and because of the differences.

Ready to start cooking!

Sitting down to the feast