An expat Thanksgiving…at the bar
29 Nov
Well, I don’t know about you, but it felt like Thanksgiving came and went all too quickly. I waited so long for that turkey and then it was just gone. Celebrating the holidays of your home country or other expats’ home countries can be a lot of fun. Fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day, barbecue and mooncake for the Chinese Moon Festival, and of course there are the holidays of your host country as well. Thanksgiving, however, presents its own special challenges when living in Asia. For one thing, almost none of us have an oven! So, even if we could get our hands on a whole turkey, what would we do with it?
Usually, I would just forget about Thanksgiving and write it off as one of the small inconveniences of expat life, but this year someone just came along and solved the problem for me. One of the local foreigner bars in Suwon decided to host two nights of Thanksgiving for the expat community. Although most of the attendees were American it was a somewhat mixed crowd and even some Koreans joined in. Now, this was not my first Thanksgiving in a bar. When I was living in New York, my cousin and I decided to celebrate at the bar across the street from the restaurant where she worked. The food was great and I drank too much. This year was a little bit more low key and I stuck to the house wine. I guess sometimes you don’t realize how much you will miss something until it’s gone, but then there are those other times when you don’t realize how much you missed something until you get it back.
Thanks to the staff at the Big Chill for a lovely evening.
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Brilliant! I think it is wonderful that a Thanksgiving celebration was provided for expats. That is such an amazing sentiment and a gesture of kindness. I am glad that you had such a great experience and that Suwon is so welcoming. Happy Holidays, my friend!
Awww, I’m glad you got to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner. That’s cool the bar decided to do that for all the expats over there. I myself made the most of my first Thanksgiving dinner home in over two years…felt like I was going to die afterwards though. lol.
Yeah I’m going home for a visit in about a month and I was asking my Mom if she could make more Thanksgiving food when I come home lol I can’t even remember what my last real Thanksgiving was like.
I had my first thanksgiving dinner abroad in Itaewon several years ago. These kinds of experiences can help bridge the gap from being away from home for an extended period of time. I remember clearly stuffing my face
Yeah I think for some people (not just Americans) it can really help them with being homesick.