Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania

An old friend kindly invited me down to Pennsylvania to spend Thanksgiving with her family this week, and it was a thoroughly relaxing couple of days. Thanksgiving seems to be basically like Christmas, but without the God, presents or Queen's speech, as far as I could work out. The vast majority of the time was spent cooking and eating enormous quantities of food and imbibing yummy drinks such as mulled cider (no sign of eggnog though, which I'm very curious about - maybe that's more a Christmas thing).

Thanksgiving dinner itself consisted of lots of turkey (or course) roasted to perfection by my friend and her Dad, along with mashed white and sweet potatoes (apparently the white potatoes were for my benefit!), stuffing made out of bread, apple and onion, cranberry relish and assorted steamed veggies. It was yummy, though certainly missing some key elements from an English Christmas turkey dinner (pigs in blankets, parsnips, roast potatoes etc). Apparently for Christmas dinner Americans tend to eat beef or pork rather than turkey. Dessert was pie, pie and more pie. Apple, pumpkin and mincemeat, to be precise - my first experience of pumpkin pie was pretty positive though I soon honed in on the apple.

We also spent a fair bit fo time in the evenings out and about in the local bars and restaurants with my host's old high school friends. A lovely bunch of people, to be sure, and it's always fun to be around a group of friends who have known each other for a very long time - the pool of stories and remeniscences is very deep indeed. One thing I found it slightly tricky to get my head round though was that many of these people still live in the area - some have settled down and had families, but my friend was one of very few who had actually flown the nest and set up shop somewhere else. Some of them had actually never left the country, so they found me to be something of a novelty as a foreigner. I always feel a little bit snobby when saying things like this, but I find it a little hard to comprehend how someone (and interesting, intelligent people at that) can choose to stay in a relative backwater like Doylestown, PA rather than living elsewhere, especially in their 20s. I've always been so drawn to the big cities and the places where "things happen". I can't imagine what my life would be like now if I'd never moved away from the Cambridgeshire backwaters where I grew up.

Ah well, takes all sorts I suppose. I'm waiting in Philly airport now for a flight to London, just for a short trip and mostly a business-focussed one. It'll be great to catch up with people though, and I should imagine a nice change to be somewhere familiar.