Happy No Water After 13:00 Thanksgiving.

  * Before we start on Thanksgiving, a couple of people asked how we dealt with our foster's croup when we didn't have water. The common treatment for croup is steam and no water means no steamy showers. But cold air also works...so when he woke up barking like a seal, we wrapped him up in a warm shawl and took him to our building roof.  Except the door was frozen shut.  So we took him down six flights of stairs and stood on our icy front stoop under the critical eye of our first floor neighbor/gossip/spy.  She went to two of her windows to see what the crazy foreigners were doing.  We did that twice that night.  The next day we had our water back and we did the steam.  Honestly, standing outside on a dark, starry night with bright white snow is better than sweating it out in a small steamy bathroom.  Either way, he is less croupy and slowly getting better.
So, Thanksgiving 2011. It was a good one. The night before Thanksgiving, I asked Paul to please get the innards out of the turkey.  I was going out with some friends and I wanted it done before I came home.  The truth is, I can't stand gizzards and the like.  I came home a few hours later to Paul  and Elisabeth laughing about their "blogworthy find" and found this in our fridge.

Yes, it's not exactly Butterball, is it?

Time for your close-up, Mr. Tom Turkey!  Oh darn, your eyes are closed.

Honestly, if I had reached in and touched that, I would have needed some psychiatric care. It was all I could do to pick it up with a paper towel to take pictures for the blog.  Yes, I did it for the blog!

Anyway, the next day I headed off to our sweet friend's apartment and used her full size oven to roast it.  Somehow, the international school finds full sized ovens for their staff and they all get them in their apartments.  Ovens are just not used here.  I was in a van once with one of the cooks ( a Chinese woman)  from the international school.  Someone asked her where she was going and she said to buy an oven.  She was then asked what they would use it for and she said she had no idea!

So..the full sized oven with the turkey in it.

Cooking a turkey in China is a little different.  They are skinnier with less juice.  I had to brush quite a bit of olive oil on the skin and baste quite a bit.  It turned out pretty well.

While I was waiting for the turkey to cook, I had to make a quick run to the store and bank. By quick I mean it took about an hour on my bike.  I came across these guys chopping up the ice.  China has quite a bit of man power!  They work together in dense groups and chop and hack until the ice is gone.  These scenes are all over the city as we have quite a bit of ice right now.

One more part of Thanksgiving Day is that we knew that we were going to lose our water at one o'clock.  This time there was a notice on the doors.  It said when the water was going off but not when it was going back on.  So we knew it could be a short time or very long.  So we were determined to be prepared. 

That's just one bathroom's worth of water!  We had jugs in our other bathroom and tubs in the kitchen.

So if you are thinking, wow that's a lot of water.  You guys must be really afraid of being thirsty....

Well, no!

This is the water that we drink!  The other water is for flushing toilets and washing dishes and hands.

Ironically when we got home around 9:30 last night, the water was back on.  So we ended up dumping most of it!  But better safe than sorry.

We had a great Thanksgiving with some other ex-pat friends.  We ate all the usual stuff- turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie.  All was made from scratch- no cans or pre-made crusts here.  It was a good day and a day in which we were very thankful.  Happy Thanksgiving, dear friends.