My second expat Thanksgiving

As I've spoken about before, one of the hard parts about being an expat is of course, feeling homesick around the holidays. I think the funny part was that this year, for thanksgiving, it was not as bad as I thought it would be. Unfortunately, we didnt get to have thanksgiving on Thursday because everyone worked (I spent half the day watching thanksgiving sitcom episodes with my students). However, we did have 2 awesome thanksgiving dinners, on Saturday and Sunday. One of the tricky things about thanksgiving as an expat is that they dont celebrate it in other countries so its not easy to find things like say.... turkey. We had to pre-order turkeys a week in advance. As we are all 20-somethings who are busy and scatterbrained, planning a week in advance does not come easily.
Saturday Thanksgiving was awesome--- shout out to my friend hannah who cooked the most amazing turkey i have ever eaten in my life. There were about 15 of us at this dinner and I think that Hannah and I were the only Americans so it was really fun to share this tradition with people from other countries. I made potentially the most sinful gouda mac and cheese known to man (an easy 2000 calories per portion) but it was awesome.
Sunday was really nice because while there were definitely some thankgiving first-timers, there was also a group of us long-term US expats. In a life that is often very transient, I felt really happy to be able to share thanksgiving with these friends for the second year in a row. The food was amazing again, and we made blueberry sauce that was unbelievably good!! (Cranberries don't exist here, but I discovered that blueberry sauce on turkey is actually really really good.)
Hope you all had a thankgiving that was as good as mine! I know I definitely had a lot to be thankful for...
Pictures to come soon!

things i would tweet 2

So today I saw a man in the most awesome pair of cutoffs. It made me a little homesick.

mood regulation...

One of the absolute hardest things about being an expat is learning to regulate your own moods. As a woman especially, we are often dependent on our support system to aid us in mood regulation. At home, if something crappy happens in your day, you call a girlfriend, bitch about it, she tells you it will be ok, and you move on. Crisis overted. As an expat, and especially an expat living in a country where cell phone calls are prohibitively expensive, thats just not an option. Its funny because I often feel like a baby, ferberizing myself. Just as babies have to learn to calm themselves down when something happens, or when their parents leave the room, we as expats, also have to learn to calm ourselves down all on our own when something bad happens.
The other day a friend of mine had a very unfortunate and disgusting run in with some perv on the subway (she had to go fill out police reports and everything). She commented that it wouldn't have been so bad if she were at home; she could have called her mom to come down to the police station and fill out the report with her, but having to do it alone just made the entire event hit her harder.
Thankfully, nothing quite so horrifying has happened to me, but I too have my bad days. My business is kind of always in flux. I get new students all the time. I also have students drop me (yet thankfully not ALL the time). Today I got dropped by a student, and while its not at all a dire situation, it just kind of sucks. Being dropped by a student sucks because you often become quite close to your students (as you spend several hours a week talking). Its kind of like getting dumped, except it has financial implications instead of romantic ones. The first thing you always do after getting dropped by a student is calculate what percentage of your income you just lost. The next thing you do is think of who can console you, tell you it will be ok. Can you go home and call them?? Is it worth the insanely expensive cell call? If you decide that you cant go home and you cant make a cell call, you then go through the process of trying to calm yourself down. Repeating in your own head "its ok... its only money.... you picked up a new student last week... it all evens out..."
The flip side of all of this is that when you have a really good day, or a high, its like extra extra high. you feel like "that was awesome!!! and i did it all on my own!!!!" I guess its just like I've been telling myself - it all evens out.

things i would tweet

So I decided to start a new section of mini-blog posts called "Things I would tweet... if I had twitter". I don't feel like I should actually get a twitter account because I would tweet maybe once a week at most, but the mini-blog posts will work just fine.
here goes...

So today, I saw this long line of really overweight people. I was confused because on the whole Argentines are thin, and you almost never see people who are severely overweight. The whole scene seemed really strange to me. Later I found out it was a casting call for a reality TV show on losing weight - like an Argentine version of "The Biggest Looser". oooohhhhhhh.

Halloween madness!!!

AHHHHHHH!!!! Happy belated halloween everyone! So, I had a wonderful halloween (but more about that in another post). This is actually a follow-up post to one I wrote a month or so ago. I was recently informed that Paula Deen dressed up as butter for halloween a few years ago. A quick google search revealed that this was true! Check out this picture!!!!

Re-creating Roma

I think most of us (by us I mean those poor, sad souls who are completely obsessed with food) have a meal in their head that was the best they ever ate. Mine was spinach gnocchi in gorgonzola cream sauce. I ate it in Rome, about 3 years ago, and have dreamed about it since. The gnocchi, so perfect and light. The gorgonzola cream sauce, so tasty and creamy. This meal was haunting my dreams--- I had to have it again.
So, Tuesday, after a particularly difficult day, I came home and decided that THAT was what I was going to eat for dinner. Lucky for me, I happened to have a professional chef coming to dinner, who helped make my dream a reality. We substituted Roquefort cheese for gorgonzola (because Roquefort is randomly a staple of Argentine cooking, and thus much much cheaper than gorgonzola).
Let me tell you, it came out AMAZING (picture above). it was soooooooooooooooo good!!! It was definitely rich, and not at all heart healthy, but 100% worth the calories. A bit of red wine made the meal perfect. Right now I have a bit of uncooked gnocchi dough left in my fridge and i feel like its screaming out to me "eat meeeeee!!!". We'll see how long I last...

Things Americans Like

So a few weeks ago, I returned back home for a brief visit. I've been living abroad for about a year and a half now, so I'm a little out of the US cultural loop. It was strange to return back home, yet to see things with the eyes of a tourist. So, here are a few of my cultural observations...
Things Americans Like:
1. Having an insane number of options. My first trip to the supermarket was a shocking experience. Granted, they haven't changed much, I had just forgotten. Anyways, this supermarket had a whole ketchup SECTION. like different brands of ketchup and all different sizes, etc. There were easily 300 bottles of ketchup there. I was amazed at how much ketchup there was! I was thinking "what, are they afraid there's gonna be a sudden run on ketchup???" My local supermarket has about 10 bottles of ketchup.
2. smartphones. it seems that EVERYONE has them in the US. Do we really need to have access to our email at all times??? Or is this just a sign of our collective impatience?
3. Highways. maybe its just because I live in a city and its been a long time since I've been on a highway but it just seemed like there were a lot of them.
4. apartment complexes. this one i'm sure isn't just me. there are definitely more apartment complexes than there were before. not that they're not nice, it's just that there are definitely more of them.
5. the jersey shore. people seem to LOVE it or love talking about how much they hate it. This one is not just the US though. The Jersey Shore is also on the air here, and they play commercials telling people to "JerseyShorearte" or "Jersey Shore yourself".
6. doggie bags. This one I think we actually have right. Restaurants serve horrifically huge portions, but at least we have the option of a doggie bag. this doesnt exist in other countries (and definitely should-- otherwise they're just going to throw that food out!!!)

All in all, it was a great trip and I was so happy to see everyone!