Taiwan Exchange: Love at First Flight: Thanksgiving in a Foreign Country

At first, Thanksgiving was hard. I woke up Thursday morning feeling excited out of habit not because anything was happening. I missed our traditions, my family, and my friends. I went to school and was pretty irritable but I made it through. I went home and cut and peeled two small pie pumpkins. My host mom steamed them while I made the custard. Then, I crushed milk and butter cookies into crumbs. Once the pumpkins were done I mashed them with a spoon and added spices, milk, and brown sugar. To assemble my no-bake pumpkin pie I got three mugs which I put a layer of cookie crumbs on the bottom of, then a layer or pupkin pie filling and a layer of custard. I repeated this twice so there were two of each layer in the mugs. Of course, whipped cream went on top. It went over really well. My host parents loved it. The next day I did the same with eight random ass containers after our Chinese test. One for each exchanger (Elena, David, Heloisa, William) and one for each teacher. It was so much fun to share something I made with people who appreciated it! It made me really happy to see how much they enjoyed it. Saturday morning I got out of bed and started work on my corn casserole. I had to improvise so much that while I was making it I began to wonder if it would even taste like corn casserole. I couldn't find sour cream, so I used yogurt. Who needs Jiffy mix when you can just buy the ingredients? No cornmeal? No problem, I'll just put in more flour! Baking powder? Just use a fourth as much baking soda. Whats vegetable oil? I'll use coconut. We don't have heavy cream but I'm sure milk will be fine! So you get the point I was a bit nervous. It came out beautifully! So I packed my corn casserole and my bag and got on the bus around 12:10. After almost a two hour commute I got off the Brown Line at Dahu park. It was a beautiful day! We couldn't have asked for better weather! I had never been to Dahu but it was amazing! I met up with other Americans and we found a place for our picnic. Everyone brought a dish. There was homemade bread, pie, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, chile, fruit, chips, soda, it was a lot! We put on American music and chilled for a while. Lovely Chloe put on the Cupid shuffle and all of us joined in on the line dancing. We obviously then had to dance the Cha Cha slide and the Macarena. We were quite the spectacle and actually attracted an audience! It was so much fun! A great way to celebrate Thanksgiving in a foreign country!