Dia de Acción de Gracias (or better known as Miah's Favorite Holiday)

Sorry we are so delayed getting this posted. We know your curiosity is killing you as to how Thanksgiving in Costa Rica played out. It was quite an ordeal that began 6 months ago when we realized that turkeys were very difficult, and expensive, to come by here. No matter what part of the world we've been in, we have always made sure to make a Thanksgiving feast, so this hurdle wasn't about to stop us now.

Thankfully, our coworker's mom has a farm about an hour away and was willing to raise a turkey for us. We named our turkey Mr. Gobble and he had a very happy life until November when it was our job to get him oven-ready. The drive to the farm was absolutely beautiful. Once there, one of the farmers helped us catch Mr. Gobble and have it drink cheap liquor until it was good and drunk. We let him stumble around for awhile before hanging him up to kill. We weren't sure we would be up to the challenge, so someone helped us out. Then, it had to be plucked before we could take it home.

Mr. Gobble was quite a substantial turkey by Costa Rican standards, but only 10 pounds which was not quite enough for the 20+ people we had for Thanksgiving the next day. We had a very cross-cultural feast combining friends from the US and Costa Rica, with traditional Thanksgiving dishes as well as typical fare from here. Keeping with the tradition though, there was more than enough for all and we were happily stuffed and sleepy after eating.

All in all, Thanksgiving was quite a success and certainly a learning experience for us as well. Next we'll have to teach the art of southern BBQ when Mrs. Oink is ready...



Back to the US tomorrow,
Team Wander

Club de yates de los campesinos (redneck yacht club)

We thought we were finally getting a handle on all the surprises that Costa Rica had in store for us, but boy were we mistaken. See, we had some grandiose plans for a Thanksgiving dinner (a family friend has been raising us a turkey for the past 6 months - that we will soon have to go butcher), but then we got wind of something new and exciting that was going to fall on the same day as said Thanksgiving. A little social maneuvering and a couple of emails later, we had everything reorganized and were on our way to Raft-Up.

Turns out that Raft-Up is really like the Costa Rican redneck yacht club. Erm... correction: it's like the Costa Rican Expat Community's redneck yacht club. At 9 am Sunday morning, we caught a surfboat (complete with deckhand Golden Retriever) out to a hidden bay along with some 300 other expats and the occasional fortunate tourist. The boat showed up in the bay and dropped anchor along-side fifteen other boats and we caught a dinghy to shore (well, Miah jumped ship and swam, but he was pretty excited to get off the boat).

From there we had a day of beach volleyball, grilling out, snorkeling, body surfing and live music. It was great! But it has inspired us to hold our own redneck yacht club sometime after we get back in North Carolina. You should come.

The one heartbreak about raft-up is that it was going to be the kickoff event for our week with the most recent group of visitors, Graham and Julie. Julie is in school at C.I.A (Culinary Institute of America) so her timing for a visit was pretty much perfect! Unfortunately, there was a little bit of a passport finding fiasco that caused them to spend the day they were supposed to be flying down here driving over 20 hours hunting down passports, so they ended up missing raft-up (insert emoticon super sad face here).

They did manage to make it down the next day, however, and we had a fantastic, food and adventure filled week with them. We went and worked on the houses together, cooked up a storm, golfed, played some Killer Bunnies and generally had a great time. We miss you guys already!




Anybody watch the Wolfpack beat Carolina last weekend?
TeamWander