We are not big “holiday” people. We can hardly be bothered to do much for most holidays, and usually use the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Christmas as long weekends for travel. But Thanksgiving has always had a soft spot in our hearts. Maybe because it’s the holiday of immigrants, or because of the spirit of being thankful for what you have, or, just maybe, because this is the one day a year you can eat enough turkey to pass out. We usually visit family or friends, and my favorite part of the celebration is when we go around the table saying what we are most thankful for this year, between bites of sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and turkey.
But this is a travel blog, and you can see where this is going. Eventually, there were just not enough long weekends and vacation days to feed our ever-growing travel addiction, and Turkey Day was one of the first casualties. 2011 was the first year we decided to travel internationally for Thanksgiving and trade the traditional turkey and trimmings for whatever exotic food our hosting country would have to offer. Thanksgiving is partly about pilgrims traveling halfway across the world to feast on local delicacies, is it not? So, we decided to follow suit. That very first Thanksgiving trip was to Egypt, and we ended up in Cairo during the Arab Spring with our hostel only three blocks away from the deadly Tahrir Square protests. Well, no one ever said that pilgrimages were safe, certainly not the original pilgrims. But they didn’t get back on the Mayflower and sail back and neither did we.
We already described that Thanksgiving dinner without mentioning that it happened during Thanksgiving. Here’s the excerpt from that post describing a young man we met in our hostel:
He was in his early twenties, an Egyptian boy who had immigrated with his family to the U.S. several years before and was currently a first-year law school student in Indiana. He was on a vacation of sorts and was in Egypt after having visited Syria. He took us to his favorite kushari place, a popular Egyptian carb-loaded dish consisting of rice, vermicelli, noodles, lentils, and tomato sauce, and chatted with Victor about law school. As the meal ended, he nonchalantly donned a gas mask and said that he was going to go to Tahrir Square to join the protests. We asked him what the protests were about and trying to accomplish. He said that he just wanted to be a part of the movement. I asked him to be careful and he shrugged nonchalantly.
What we didn’t mention is that we took him out specifically because it was Thanksgiving, and we wanted to share the meal with the only other person around who was familiar with this holiday. We knew that we weren’t going to find anything close to turkey and yams in Egypt, so we chose the most traditional of Egyptian foods – kushari. We didn’t go around the table saying what we were most thankful for, but I remember thinking that I was most thankful that my family and friends were safe.
The very next year, we spent Thanksgiving in Argentina with our friend Ayala. It wasn’t the original plan, and Ayala initially wanted to travel to Argentina in the summer until she realized that our summer was their winter and just how cold it was going to be there. So, we moved our trip to November and ended up celebrating Thanksgiving in Ushuaia on the southernmost tip of South America, nicknamed the “End of the World.” We spent most of the day traveling from Iguazu Falls and were exhausted from the previous days’ long hikes and the hectic flight with a stopover in Buenos Aires. We found a Chilean/Argentine seafood restaurant, where we dined on paella, steamed fish, and calamari, and even drank white wine serendipitously called “Santa Julia”. In all the pictures, we look tired, yet happy. That year, I was most thankful for having great friends with whom I could travel to the edge of the world.
Four years later, in 2016, we went to Japan for two weeks and spent Thanksgiving Day in a monastery in the mountains. We had the most delectable meal, the ingredients of which we absolutely couldn't identify beyond the fact that everything was 100% vegetarian. We already wrote about this day in a previous post:
It was almost dinner time, and we rushed back to our room and changed into provided robes. We sat on the floor cushions taking selfies until another young monk delivered trays full of tiny plates. He didn't speak English to explain the menu, so I didn't know what to expect for dinner. In fact, I still didn't know what to expect even when directly looking at the meal, because I couldn't identify most of the ingredients. But we were hungry and dug right in. It was all vegetarian, and everything was absolutely delicious. After some googling, I found out that some of it might have been tofu skin and freeze-dried tofu or something called “devil's tongue jelly”. There was one small plate with a tiny slice of what might have been a vegetable, and tasting it immediately reminded me of something I ate in my childhood. For the life of me, I couldn’t place the taste or the smell and spent the next hour staring at the ceiling, rethinking my entire life in an attempt to identify what I had just eaten. Now that I think about it, this entire episode can be easily explained by a rogue hallucinogenic mushroom masquerading as food.
That year, I was thankful for new experiences.
In 2017, we had an early Thanksgiving gathering with friends and flew out that evening to Portugal, where we feasted on fried sardines and… attempted to enjoy bacalhau. Below is the excerpt from a previous post on that very first encounter with a Portuguese food favorite:
Bacalhau, the iconic dish of Portugal, is made from salted and dried cod. There are hundreds of recipes and ways to cook it. We saw giant fillets of salted and dried cod in grocery stores available for purchase, and the locals were buying it to cook at home. Chasing local experiences, we decided to try bacalhau in an upscale restaurant on the first full day in Lisbon. The dish was beautifully served and looked appetizing, but it took me only one bite to realize that it was … absolutely inedible. It tasted so bland and boring as if I was chewing on shredded paper. After another bite, I immediately reminded Julia that we had agreed to share our dishes and requested half of the sardine sandwich. Julia ate her portion of bacalhau in total silence, angrily eyeing the quickly disappearing sardine sandwich on my plate. She later said the entire experience was one long internal debate on whether it was worth simply abandoning it and ordering something else or keeping giving bacalhau another chance. In the end, bacalhau won on a technicality – she ate most of it, but it simply never got better.
That year, I was thankful for all the bountiful fish in the sea, most of which tasted better than salted and dried cod.
A year later, in 2018, we took a red-eye flight to Mexico City and then a two-hour bus to Puebla, one of Mexico’s regions known for its contributions to Mexican cuisine. On Thanksgiving Day, we dined on a quintessentially poblano dish - chiles en nogada. As we wrote previously:
It is a poblano pepper stuffed with picadillo (a mix of shredded meat, fruits, and spices) and topped with a walnut-based cream sauce (nogada) and pomegranate seeds. The dish has the coloration of a Mexican flag: green pepper, white sauce, and red pomegranate seeds. In Puebla, the dish is quite popular in September when pomegranates are in season and patriotic feelings run high as Mexico celebrates its independence on September 16. We had this dish for lunch on our first day in Puebla and it was just perfect. It was exotic enough but not too strange and we liked its sweet taste.
That year, I was thankful that Victor had started to learn Spanish and we no longer needed to rely on guessing what we were ordering from the menu.
In 2021, we took a rare holiday in the U.S. and went to Sedona, Arizona, to enjoy some hiking. The sights around Sedona were so beautiful and the hiking was so incredible, that I am now beyond incensed that we never wrote a single blog entry about that trip. That’s an oversight that will need to be corrected as soon as possible. But reasonably - next year. After a full day of climbing up and down mountains, we were back in town, only to realize that all stores and restaurants were closed because of Thanksgiving. Everyone was at home with their families, celebrating around a table overflowing with food, except the two of us, sitting around a motel room, tired and hungry. I finally found one restaurant in Google Maps that was open and unsurprisingly, it was a Thai restaurant. Asian restaurants in the U.S. are famous for always being open – be it Christmas, Thanksgiving, or the end of the world. We ate pad thai and crab wontons and were very thankful for the hospitality, the food, and the restaurant’s flexible hours.
In 2022, Victor celebrated Turkey Day in … Turkey! Well, almost. The country is now known as Türkiye, and Victor flew there to meet up with his family while I stayed at home. When it was Thanksgiving evening in Chicago and I celebrated with friends by consuming conspicuous amounts of turkey and sweet potato casserole, it was morning in Istanbul and Victor took his parents for a traditional Turkish breakfast of sesame seed-covered simit, eggs, cheese, jams, honey, and coffee. We sent pictures of our meals to each other and despite being thousands of miles away, for a minute it felt like we were around the same table. I was thankful that after a few hard years of Covid restrictions and political unrest, Victor was finally able to see his family and spend some time with them.
This Thanksgiving we will be spending with friends and then flying to Toronto in search of more poutine and French onion soup. No matter where we are on Thanksgiving or what we are eating, the spirit of the holiday always stays with me – to be thankful for all good things in our lives, to be with people we love, and to eat a week's worth of food in one sitting.
Happy Thanksgiving!
