Thanksgiving in Nicaragua

I'm going to be honest.  The days leading up to Thanksgiving were emotional for us.  We love to cook.  We love the farmer's market, the prep work in the kitchen, the planning, the anticipation.  We love figuring out our entire turkey day, from what champagne we'll have with breakfast quiche to when the bird needs to go in to which wines to have with dinner and dessert.  But it's not just the food, of course.

We especially miss family, even though Bex! and I usually did our own thing.  For me, being able to call each of my kids and my siblings to wish them a happy day, to catch up a little, to play 'show and tell' with what we each were preparing for our meals is something I've known all along to be very precious and even more so now that we're so far away.  Yeah, I sent them all a Facebook message but it wasn't the same.

So... emotional.  We were busy teaching so we never really talked about it.  But I could see it in her eyes and I'm sure she could see it in mine.  A slight case of homesick.  We'd been on Ometepe for four weeks at this point and things were starting to stress us out a little.  All manner of encounters with the local fauna, the same food day in and day out, the ever-changing responsibilities and workload for teaching were all gradually taking their toll on our morale.

Plus, our plans for post-Ometepe life in Central America were gradually taking shape.  Looking forward to what was coming was making the time left seem... I don't know, annoying.  Like, let's fast forward and and get on with our adventure.

I don't want to sound like we were in tears or pissed off and snapping at each other.  Or that we weren't enjoying a helluva lot where we were and what we were doing.  We truly were and still are.  This place is amazing - lush, green, wondrous and mysterious.  The people of Merida have fully accepted us, calling to us whenever we walk around the village.  "Profesors!!"  "Teachers!!"  And our students all make a point to engage us when they see us.  The kindergartners always run up for hugs or high fives.  It's awesome, really.

Thanksgiving Day arrived and it was routine.  We taught our five year olds, had lunch, put together the lesson plan for our high schoolers in the evening, then taught that class.  All a normal day here.  Part of a Facebook post I sent early that morning, tongue firmly in cheek, '...wanted to wish our loved ones a happy... Thursday.  Because here it's just Thursday.'  

This is as close as we got to a turkey dinner.  Luckily for these guys, it was "just Thursday".

But we had devised a plan to salvage the day!  And we were excited for our dinner.  Michael is one of the students in our adult class.  His mom has a restaurant nearby called El Pescadito's.  We'd heard good things from others who had eaten there, so decided this would be where we would enjoy Thanksgiving dinner.  We knew the menu was different than the one at Hacienda Merida, so the anticipation had us smiling.

We ordered wonderfully delicious ice cold Coca-Cola's, served in glass bottles with straws.  Like I've said, cold drinks here are special!  We ordered sopa de pollo (chicken veggie soup) for us to share.  Bex! ordered enchiladas, I ordered the tacos.  In Nicaragua, these dishes are much different than what we gringos are used to.  The taco is a thick tortilla, filled, rolled then fried until its crispy.  I've seen these in the states in the freezer section sold as 'taquitos'.  The enchilada is a tortilla, filled and folded in half, like an Italian calzone.  Also fried but a little less crispy than my tacos.  Both were covered in shredded vegetables with a sauce drizzled on top. 

The soup was amazing!  Full of vegetables and a big piece of chicken, still on the bone.  The broth tasted so good - salty, savory.  I could have just had a big bowl of the broth.  We knew the veggies were fresh.  How?  Well, one of the ingredients is quequisque, the closest thing we have in the US is the sweet potato.  We placed our order and a few minutes later, Michael's mom sent him on an errand.  He came back a short time later, dirt on his hands, with fresh-from-the-ground quequisque!    

Food here takes a while.  Merida is small and there ain't a lot of tourists that make it this far down the road.  Nothing is prepped, let alone cooked, until someone walks in and orders. We didn't mind.  We had cold drinks and... music videos!  We haven't seen a TV in quite some time so this was kinda cool.  Michael switched the channel from some nature show to music videos from the 80's and 90's.  Awesome!  We saw Michael Jackson's 'Bad', P Diddy's 'I'll Be Watching You' re-mix, 'I Swear' by All For One, Paul Simon and Chevy Chase doing 'You Can Call Me Al'.  There was a video from the Backstreet Boys and many other videos from bands of that era no one remembers.  It was so much fun!

One cool thing we realized during dinner was that our Thanksgiving meal was based on many principles we feel very strongly about.  El Pescadito's grows their own rice and beans, their own quequisque and plantains and taro.  The other ingredients they use mostly come from within the village with other staples purchased across the lake in Rivas.  Our meal was a genuine 'farm-to-table' experience!!  The food was tasty and it broke us out of the funk we'd been in all week.  We were all smiles when we left.  

Happy Thanksgiving!

And if you want to spice up your next holiday Nicaragua style, here are some videos.