gobble gobble

Today was Thanksgiving. A fantastic American holiday whose only purpose is to celebrate the American way of eating: overindulgently. It's a full out celebration of obesity. Seriously... what other holiday is there that you wake up, eat breakfast, lay around all day in your comfies watching parades and football games, undo the first button of your pants to provide extra space, and then my God eat until you fall over in a 25 pound turkey-induced coma. And that, my friends, is why I love Thanksgiving.

So thank you to everyone who emailed and IMed me to rub in my face the fact that I could not partake as usual. You all hold a special place on my hate list. The following was information which was most pointed out to me by my loving friends:
1) I could not watch the Macy's Thanksgiving parade on tv
2) I did not wake up slowly to the smell of Thanksgiving preparations. Instead, I woke up to the musical delights of an alarm clock.
3) I WENT TO CLASS TODAY.
4) I didn't get to go to the East Lyme townie bar last night to get wasted. Oh wait, I'm not upset about that.
5) Your mother was making pies.
6) Instead of showering this morning, you decided to bathe in gravy... because you could.

Here was my Thanksgiving. I went to class. Yep. Class. On Thanksgiving. Our original plan was to make Thanksgiving here in the apartment and invite friends... especially exciting was the idea of giving our Spanish 'Thanksgiving virgin' friends their first Thanksgiving. I was envisioning the meal and the conversations regarding Turkey Day traditions... and thank you Paco for making one of my imagined conversations come true:

"Wait, so there's bread... stuffed INSIDE the turkey?" ideally accompanied by a puzzled, horrified look.
"Well yeah obviously... you stick it right in there.
"What the..." more horrified looks.
"But first you have to shove your entire arm inside the turkey and fish out the plastic bag containing all the turkey 'innards'"

However, we lost interest... not in our friends clearly (whew, close one) but more so meaning that general morale about actually preparing an entire Thanksgiving meal decreased and the amount that said meal would have ripped from our meager bank accounts made us think twice about it. And we didn't find any turkeys. Although, as Angel has pointed out, we did not look very hard. Regardless, we decided to go to the Hard Rock Cafe, which was offering a full Thanksgiving dinner. Hooray.

Thinking in advance like the smart gal that she is, Joanne headed down there last night to ask if they accepted reservations since we were going to be a group of 6. The response, from the English-speaking and actually English man, was "No... only for parties greater than 20 people." I point this out to show that there was no language barrier between the two and therefore no miscommunication. Fine. So today, we headed there an hour and half before we wanted to eat (our goal was to be seated and ordering at 8:30pm) to get in line/get a table/put our name on a waiting list... whatever. However, clearly because it's us, the first thing we are asked upon our arrival is:

"Oh, well, do you have a reservation?"
"No, they told me yesterday that you don't take reservations"
"Oh... well, we do for Thanksgiving."
We looked at him with dead, scathing eyes.

After a five minute conversation with this man, we learned that if we waited we could probably sit and eat around 10:30. It was 7:00. So, we headed towards Tony Roma's with diminishing hopes that they, being another American chain restaurant, would be offering up a similar Thanksgiving feast. The restaurant didn't open until 8:30. It was now 7:10. So, we sat on the steps right smack in front of the restaurant in the cold, people walking by looking at our determined faces, to assure that we would be the first people in the restaurant. It was reminiscent of camping out for concert tickets... except camping out for concert tickets normally yields desired results: you go to the concert and rock out to the music and its fantastic.

Camping out for Thanksgiving dinner at Tony Roma's apparently yields weird-tasting turkey, liquidy cold mashed potatoes, and a lump of shredded cabbage that resembled purple sauerkraut. We poured salt over everything to try and add some normal taste into the mix. And I mean a lot of salt: I can feel my arteries closing up. No bread, no stuffing, no cranberry sauce, no sweet gherkin pickles... I need to stop, I'm tearing up. Sniff. And the meal finished off with the weirdest tasting apple pie of my life. I pretty positive that instead of being something that was baked, it was a boxed pastry that was frozen and merely thawed out.

photos:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=i46xdcx.gij5x35&Uy=2bfax6&Ux=0