Happy Thanksgiving!

Past Thursday was THE holiday of the year in the US.
Most people got Thursday and Friday off for an extra long Thanksgiving weekend.
The start of the Holiday Season.

I was lucky to be invited by my roommate and her family for a traditional Thanksgiving Turkey dinner on Thursday. We would justify eating lots of food by participating in a 5K race beforehand.

And so I drove my boss his car (for which me my roommate and her brother were very grateful) to Albany, Niskayuna to be more precise in New York state. We decided to leave early on Wednesday to avoid traffic, but even by leaving at 3pm we still had major traffic jams: everybody was leaving for Thanksgiving! After 4 hours of driving (1 extra hour due to the traffic jam) we arrived in the Dublin street in Nisky. The beautiful big houses in this area immediately drew my attention, many of them having a pool, including that of my roommate. We had chinese for dinner, talked a lot about running, the past, high school mates, ... L. and me went for ice cream with some of her high school friends: Evan, Mike Chow, and the special twin brothers, Matt and Chris Law (or something like that). The ice cream was goooood: I chose the flavor Apple Pie Caramel. Evan and Mike laughed a lot about 'talking points'. It made me realize though that my high school period is such a long time ago...getting old...
After ice cream we went to Evan's house, talked a bit and went to bed around midnight to be awake for the 5K race.

Thursday morning, Thanksgiving morning, 5K race morning.
It was bloody cold, below zero degrees I'm sure. And we arrived at 8:10am at the start of the race. And we were clearly not the only ones. I think almost everybody in Nisky signed up to race in the cold on Thanksgiving. At least that was my impression. L. knew a lot of people from high school that were also there to run, her parents knew lots of other parents, her brothers knew lots of other high school people. It reminded me of me going to my home town, walking around and being recognized as the daughter of the women that takes care of children, or as the girl who use to play volleybal in Ellikom, or as the girl who when to the only local elementary school. I wonder whether I will become known in the future as the girl who lived in Boston for a year :-).
Anyway, at 8:45 L. and me decided to jog a little to warm up since (again) it was extremely cold to run. We returned back to the start around 8:57. In time to get to the 20th row or so, so we wouldn't loose too much time before actually crossing the start line. We started the 5K or 3.1 mile really fast, trying to get in a good position and passing lots of slower people. The 2nd mile again was very fast (around 7:30 min pace) but then my legs were getting very soar and I had to reduce the speed unfortunately. We still finished around 24 min which is not bad but I was a little disappointed of not being able to keep up the fast pace. But I was happy we finished and could get back in the warm car after taking some pictures and talking to some more people and wishing people around (strangers to me but that didn't matter at all) a happy Thanksgiving.
The rest of the day contained: taking a quick hot shower (quick since after 20 min we would run out of water and 6 people wanted to enjoy that hot shower), watching the NFL (Patriots won! woohoo), taking a nap, offering to help for dinner which was not necessary, watch some more other football, checking the advertisements for Black Friday (more info below ;-)), and waiting for the GO signal for dinner.
At 4pm L.'s dad let us know dinner was being served. We had the most delicious Turkey I ever had: very soft, tasty, with the good cranberry sauce, squash, mashed potatoes, boiled onions, olives, sweet pickles, selery, fresh rolls, gravy, and I might forget something else there was on the table. It was a very nice dinner, with a very nice red wine, very nice discussions, very traditional thanksgiving. We stuffed ourselves quite a bit, although for real, this is nothing compared to the Christmas dinners I have had before in Belgium. In Belgium we start with appetizers, soup, main course, dessert: at least. We might had a course before the soup and something between the soup and main course. I agree that nobody is hungry after the main course but still we will have dessert :-). We like sweets :-).
Another hour or 3 after dinner we ate the dessert: apple, pumpkin or mintsmeet? pie with ice cream, wipped cream or both :-).
I enjoyed the apple pie with ice cream in front of a very classic (apparently) holiday movie: it's a wonderful life! I loved the movie! I had goose bumps in the end when they start to sing and the bells ring and everybody is so happy :-), nice!
Time to go to bed after that movie cause we planned to get up around 5:30 to leave early for Black Friday shopping!

Friday morning: 5:30am: Black Friday morning.
Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving (this holiday is always on a Thursday) and on that day all shops give enormous discounts on everything imaginable possible. Electronics at Wallmart are extremely cheap, downside: Wallmart opens at midnight on Black Friday and quantities are limited. Solution: either you get there at midnight or you merge into the crowd later that day, or you just skip the electronics part like we did :-). L. and me decided to leave at 6:00am to go to the mall which had a JC penneys, AE, Old Navy, Macy's, Dicks, NYC, Victoria Secret and so much more. Beforehand I did not really needed anything but sweaters for Koen and some polo's, and maybe a dress. After 3 hours of shopping I ended up with two dresses, a belt, 3 polo's for Koen, a sweater (very nice one! actually named manigan here), a pair of dressy shoes to wear with the dress and a black shirt for less than 150 dollars (according to L., I did actually not do any calculation :-)). Worth getting up at 5:30am for!
We had some soft pretzels as breakfast, checked out some stores without buying anything (well done!), skipped macy's to overcome buying more and drove home.
In the afternoon I again watched some football (college football this time), we tried to arrange meeting the high school friends of L. again, and decided to get a quick haircut :-). It took about 3 hours to arrange a date with Evan and Mike. The others went to Ruby's. We drove to another city close to Niskayuna, had some drinks (diet coke for me, no more alcohol after SD ;-))
The place was packed with other high school years, I did not know anybody and enjoyed just watching couples on a first/second/... date, watching a guy hitting on a blond girl while the brown friend (girl) did not like it at all :-) haha!
We decided to go home around midnight again, since the place was not all to amusing and we were very tired of running the day before, getting up early, ... But before we went to bed we had another piece of warm apple pie with ice cream: mmmm mmmm mmmm!

Saturday morning, 7:30am. Plan to go for a 8 mile run in Nisky at 8:30am followed by Jean's B-day brunch at 10:30am.
L. and me got a ride from L.'s dad to the high school from which we ran to the bike path along the Mohawk river. This bike path has been there for ages (used for transport before) and is very very long. It stretches from the Hudson river in NYC to the Great Lakes in Buffalo NY. We only did about 5 miles along this river and I found it took us forever. Not the best run ever but still we finished the 8 miles in about 1h10min.
We definitely deserved a quick hot shower and more importantly a nice brunch. I was starving! :-). We drove to a local brunch place, ate a lot of food (twice as much as most others: pancakes, bacon, egg, potatoes and toast), wished Jean a happy B-day, bought some bread and a huge cupcake, said goodbye to all of them, while everybody had the same request: come and visit us/me sometime. After a filling brunch we went back to the couch, took a nap, watched some football (again, so now I have had enough of this sport for a while).
On Friday we decided to try out L.'s dad new cocktail: a mix of vodka, citron, white cranberry juice and champagne. It was extremely good! We had some cheese and crackers as appetizers. And for dinner, the youngest brother K. decided to cook some very nice Pork Wellington (mum, you should definitely try to make this once, its very good!). We drank wine, discussed about politics, languages, inflation-deflation, liberal, republicans, sarah palin, obama, the lack of a belgian government, ... We ended the dinner with some pies over a funny National Lampoon x-mas holiday movie and went to bed for a good night rest before heading back to Boston on sunday morning.

On sunday morning we slept in a little bit (read 8:00 am that is), had breakfast, packed our bags and left for a 3h road trip back to Boston. We said goodbye to L.'s family. Her parents gave me a big hug, which made me feel quite emotional: I could feel tears of joy. It's the story of leaving footprints...footprints in my life.