Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Thanksgiving Weekend

This Sunday one of my friends was running in the Birmingham 1/2 marathon (13.1km). So bright and early (9:30am!!!) on a typical British morning (overcast, bit of fog, around 10 degrees and a bit of a misty breeze in the air - which is actually the first real British day/morning that I've seen, because the weather has been fantasitc here) some of us got up and went downtown and watched the runners take off. I had never been to a marathon before and it was very interesting to watch how they stagger the starts a bit, so that no one gets really injured.


Then we had about 1 1/2 - 2hrs until the runners were coming to the finish line, so we went for coffee and then walked a bit of the route before finding a nice spot to hang out near the finish. Afterwards, aside from the actually running I was thinking it would be a great way to see a lot of different areas of the city.

After the race I went grocery shopping and I bought some potatoes, corn, broccoli, mushrooms, cheese, cranberry sauce, stuffing and gravy. Then on Monday I went to the meat market and got a fresh 6lb chicken (they only had a 20ish pound boneless turkey which would have been way too big - but at least the chicken i got I knew was good since it was "reared by Mr. J. Clark").


That night I ended up cooking a big thanksgiving feast for some of my friends. We had a perfectly seasoned chicken which was cooked to perfection (if I do say so), mashed potatoes, canned corn, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, and a broccoli, mushroom and cheese bake for dinner and then dessert was apple pie (they didn't have any pumpkin pie :P), vanilla ice cream and we also had a bunch of chocolates.





It seems like everyone over here eats lots of chocolates (which I guess you can't really blame them since its ooh so good!). It was a huge success and everyone seemed to love it and took some of the leftovers back to there flats, although I’m sure I’ll still be eating leftovers all week now :-P. I did it because it was the first holiday we miss and being here 3 weeks now some of us are starting to miss home a little bit (but of course I’m talking about others and not myself ;-) ).

As if thanksgiving dinner wasn't enough to remind us of home, one of my Canadian friends found us a TIM HORTON's!!! and took us there this morning :D. Well it's not a full store more like a vending station in the corner of a convenience store, but they have the coffee, donuts and muffins and it's not too bad .. still not like a real Tim’s you'd get in Canada but it's definitely the next best thing!



I think I have now finally gotten caught up .. and hopefully I wont leave it soo long anymore :-P

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