Thanksgiving parties

Incidentally, this is my 50th post.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. This is a holiday where Americans celebrate the joys of gathering with family and eating turkey, by gathering with family and eating turkey (as opposed to Christmas, where they celebrate the birth of Jesus by gathering with family and eating turkey).

I went to three thanksgiving parties. The first was on Saturday, organised by the FOCUS missionaries. They had cooked turkey, and guests brought some food so we ended up with plenty. Most of the foods there were reasonably familiar: turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce, corn, potatoes in some kind of creamy sauce, beans in a different kind of creamy sauce (not sure that I've really had that before, but I've had beans and I've had creamy sauce, and putting the two together is no huge advance). The oddest dish I had was sweet potato with marshmallows. Yes, this was a main course dish. Although I usually don't like sweet things with my savoury main course, I found this enjoyable just be pretending it was a dessert that happened to be on my main course plate.

We had many fun games as well, particularly the 'dating gameshow' game. Three people are assigned a character (either a real or fictional person, eg. James Bond, or some defining characteristic, eg. is slowly turning into a giraffe). A fourth person (who had left the room) has to guess who they are, by asking only questions that would be reasonable on a dating gameshow. I'll give you all a chance to guess my character by recounting the conversation.

Q: Who is your hero?
A: My 'ero eez myzelf (the strange spelling is meant to represent a very bad, but correctly identified, French accent).
Q: What is your favourite artwork?
A: Ze portrait of myzelf (hmm, I was noticing a theme about this time, but I couldn't think of anything else on the spot).
Q: Where is your favourite holiday destination (this question was actually asked of the person before me, but I had a good answer as well so I asked to answer it as well).
A: I like all of Europe, especially Italy and Belgium. My least favourite place eez Rus-sia. I spent a very bad winter there.

That was all: she didn't actually guess, but was heading in the right direction. Post your guesses as comments!

We also had fun chatting and singing.

On Wednesday I went to the Sidney Pacific thanskgiving dinner. This was a nice time to chat with friends (mostly fellow physicists and people from my SPICE group), while enjoying the beginning of the long weekend.

Yesterday some friends from the Catholic community met for dinner. In the end there were only three for dinner and one who came later: we were hoping for more. We spent the afternoon cooking (inactively a reasonable amount of the time) and watching Clue (a very funny movie based on the game known in Australia as Cluedo), followed by eating, drinking (juice!) and having a good time. We continued the Disney theme of TCC gatherings with Hercules, and parted at 11pm having had a great time.