dia de accion de gracias

thanksgiving has always been up there as my favorite holiday. when i decided to go abroad this semester i specifically thought about how i would miss going to idyllwild to see family i usually only see once or twice a year. well thanksgiving found its way over to ecuador and resulted in a really pleasant, loving day for me and i'm guessing for all of the people who took part with us.

a friend had all 18 of us pitzer in ecuador students over and we all brought some traditional and non traditional food to share. i brought a fruit pie (for all the good fruit and juices in ecuador, this place doesn't really know how to do a pie) as my entrance ticket while other people brought stuffing, cranberry jello, mashed potatoes, chickens and drinks. the chickens were our mini turkeys and everything was absolutely delicious.

through drunken toasts, everyone said how thankful they were for the food on our plate, the people we are sharing it with, and our families who helped us get here and we all, spoken or not, felt like a strange collective representing something like a family.

after the food we all felt like we had to hold our bellies in so they wouldn't explode, and so a few of us went on a nice evening walk around the block a couple times and stretched on a street corner.

then, a few of us decided it was poker time, so seven of us sat around the now cleared dinner table and with a $1 buy in, started playing. a couple of the people who joined didn't really know how to play and that manifested in one of them making a strategy of betting really high when she had something, anything that wasn't nothing. well, i lost quick because i always seemed to have a decent hand but someone else always could beat it, and the only way any of us could play was with betting a lot of chips so a friend and i ran out and lost first. it was tragic. but i stuck around the table and the person who was bidding so high eventually decided she didn't want to play, so i played for her. well, the people's republic of maya won the game, and we redistributed the dollars back out to everyone so nobody lost.

at this point most people had left and so a couple friends and i hopped a cab and went home. it was so nice to talk to my family in idyllwild and even though i did wish i could have been there, i felt the love enough to make me happy just from talking to them for a few minutes. i hope everybody had a fantastic thanksgiving and thank you guys for everything.