Happy Turkey Day

I was beginning to worry that we would have no plans for Thanksgiving and end up sitting in our apartment with the lights off, crying. Luckily a hail mary pass from John Cho saved our Thanksgiving Eve and a last-minute invite from Frans and Michelle rescued our Turkey Day from being a lonely affair.

On Wednesday night we trundled out to Brooklyn for a pre-thanks dinner with John, his gf Sasha and Durell. John has this awesome 1.5 bedroom place with a huge living space and even bigger kitchen. He had prepared a table full of treats including mac'n'cheese, a roast chicken, cranberry sauce and homemade pita. Timon and I bought wine and beer and we chow'd down, representing healthy Aussie appetites, for a couple of hours. It wasn't a super late night but I must have been drunker than I thought, because the next morning I woke up with a killer headache.

I'd been planning on attending the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade because, well, it just seemed like the thing to do. The parade involves many giant balloons that are escorted down Central Park West and Broadway to end up outside Macy's in Herald Square. Most parades in this city tend to favour 5th Avenue which is much further from our apartment so it seemed very convenient. Alas, it would have been more convenient if the parade started at noon. We ended up leaving the house at 11am and by the time we got to the starting point the final balloons were making their way down the street. People were flooding the subway in an attempt to get home so we battled our way through to catch a fleeting glimpse of the back of some elf balloons. To be honest, we were never going to get up at 7am to stake out a claim on the street so this picture seems like a fair reward for our laziness.

It WAS a spectacular day for it, considering the day before had been grey and rainy. We enjoyed the sunshine and walked our way up Broadway from 66th to home. We stopped by a diner and had omelettes for brunch, along with the millions of other parade-watchers. The rest of the day was spent watching movies (me) and playing Skyrim (timon). By 7pm we were walking out the door, back to Brooklyn for a fancy turkey feast at Frans' restaurant Aurora (he's a chef). We met up with Michelle, her sister Melissa and partner Simon who are visiting from Sydney. Sadly for Frans he was stuck in the kitchen all night but we enjoyed cauliflower and lobster soup with caviar, quail on lentils with a foie gras crostini, roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and veggies and veal cheeks with polenta and mushrooms. And wine of course. Dessert was a warm chocolate cake with berries. Yes, it was the most expensive meal Timon and I have had ($80 each after all was said and done) but it was nice to be grownups for a change. We can eat $1 dumplings for the next two months to make up for it!

I'm not all that sure that Thanksgiving is a holiday that should be celebrated with total abandon as it seems to entail a dark history for the native Americans. But, I don't really know anything about that so I'm going to take a day off work and share a bottle of wine with my special people. I'm very thankful for the opportunities I have to live out my dreams and I'm so very thankful to have the best guy next to me while I do it.