Thanksgiving Greek Style

A group of 33 American students studying abroad and our big holiday is spent in another country. Aphrodite, our host "mom", has been doing what she does for years and always hosted a Thanksgiving for her students. So Thanksgiving evening, in the apartment of Iridanou, my roommates and I were having an interesting cooking experience. Aphrodite was completely prepared to make an entire feast, for well around 40+ people, but that didn't leave room for making pies. So each of the girls apartment were to make a pie and bring it to dinner. We found this to be interesting...without measuring cups, a real recipe, or a pan to cook in. However, we did get a pretty decent apple pie made. Rami, our Lebanese tagalong, even tried ours and said it was good. Anyway, when we got to dinner the spread was incredible!

Turkey, mashed potatoes, Greek potatoes (oh heaven, they must be added to my Thanksgiving table this year!), corn, cranberry sauce, stuffing, cheese, salad, bread, wine (oh course, its Europe!), and a million other things. There was SO much food, so much in fact that we got to take extra plates home with us. Anyway, we were entirely stuffed and the food was amazing! Then Andrew gave after dinner massages (lol), we ate the pumpkin and apple pies (and Suzanne's amazing pumpkin dip!), and just enjoyed our Greek family during a very family oriented holiday. Ok, so it wasn't my grandma's house with her homemade apple dumplings and fresh from the oven bread...but it was special and unique and still great.

The best part of Thanksgiving was to come after dinner though! It was one of the girl's in our groups birthday, Diana. And we had this ongoing joke throughout our three months about how I was a robot...how this came to be, I have no idea! It was a crazy and silly thing (only to be more hysterical when the "Automatic Lover" music video played on MadTV!) and Andrew thought it would be the best ever to dress me up in boxes decorated like a robot to make a birthday delivery of Grey Goose vodka. At first I did not want to do it. I felt like a moron as they were putting the boxes on me (which I found out later Andrew had gotten some guy to give him out of the trash!)...it got even worse when we were in the lobby of their apartment and the people walking by in the lobby could see them preparing me for the delivery. Oh but when the time came?...

...I was the best birthday robot ever. I was mute except for the occasional "beep beep boop", but I did a mean robotic version of the macarena and delivery of vodka. Diana loved it, we were all in hysterics laughing. Then of course we had to have fun with the "hug a robot", "be the robot" pictures! Happy Thanksgiving from the shores of Greece :-)