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Thanksgiving in Prague

By jfbarszcz

One of the worst things about going abroad in the fall is missing out on Thanksgiving festivities in the States. I think I speak for almost all Americans when I say that Thanksgiving has always been one of the highlights of my year. I get to spend time with family and friends from home, I get to eat one of the biggest and best meals of the year, and I don't have school. What's not to love?

Of course, the godless communists nice friendly people over here in the Czech Republic don't celebrate American holidays, which includes Thanksgiving. And even if they did, it's not like I'm just gonna catch a plane back to New Jersey for the weekend. Consequently, this was the first Thanksgiving I ever spent away from home (and the first Thanksgiving I had class, gah).

But all was not lost! The absolutely wonderful people who run the program I'm in understand that Thanksgiving is a major tradition for all of us and did a great job of accommodating this peculiar cultural institution of ours. They arranged a Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant near our kolej, and it was surprisingly authentic. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce... it was almost enough to make me feel like I was home. No doubt this was made possible thanks to our lovely dorm mother, Zuzana, who was born and raised in Prague but now splits her time between here and Massachusetts, and seems to know just about everyone who lives in this city. The particular restaurant we ate at, in fact, is run by close personal friends of hers and her late husband's. Thus, I'm going to make an educated guess and say that she was the one who masterminded the whole feast. I don't know how well-acquainted the chefs at this place actually are with American fare and Thanksgiving, but either way I was quite impressed with how well everything was done. And while I wasn't with my family, I had no shortage of people to celebrate with, and I was thankful for that.

Further thanks must also be given to the marvels of modern technology, for enabling me to spend a little time with my family, even as I was four thousand miles away. And doing so was as simple as opening my laptop and firing up Skype. Well, a little more complicated than that, since we had to pre-arrange a mutually-agreeable time to call, but considering how video calling, especially internationally, was practically unheard of even a decade ago, it's astounding how easy it is to do now.

In all, while I feared that Thanksgiving was something I'd have to simply forgo this year, circumstances conspired to make that not the case. Kind of meta, in a way, in that Thanksgiving is when you talk about being thankful for all the things you normally take for granted, but until going abroad, Thanksgiving itself was one of those things. But knowing that things could easily not have worked out the way they did makes me even more thankful!