I feel like writing this single article in English, because our Thanksgiving was so American and it was amazing, that writing in English will reflect in a better way how it was. My roommate Scott was so kind to invite Carolin and me to his parents’ place in La Canada, which is close to LA. We left San Diego on Wednesday evening and arrived in LA at around 11pm. Only his littlest brother was still awake, who we met right away. La Canada is a suburb where mostly families live and there are a lot of single-family houses, some of them seem to be pretty posh, coming with large properties. Being located in this kind of area, also Scott’s parents’ house is really huge. Every single room in the house is very spacious. And it felt good to be in family place again. All the walls were full of pictures of family members (Scott has three more brothers) or any kinds of awards. Since all of the boys played in the football marching bands or other bands, there were quite a lot of awards and sometimes there wasn’t much wall left behind all the frames. Anyways, that first evening instead o going to bed, we watched a movie, which is called “The anchor man”. It’s about a news anchor, typical love story, and the fun part is, that it plays in San Diego.
Since their house is so big, Carolin and me each got our own room. So the next day was the day of Thanksgiving. We started by preparing our food. Each guest of the thanksgiving dinner had to prepare a dish. Carolin went for a potato salad while I prepared our well known Raspberry Cantuccini Desert. We were done at noon, so we decided to go to a viewpoint, where one can see whole LA and its surrounding area. Unfortunately the weather was rather humid that day, so we could not even see downtown. So we went back to Scott’s place and enjoyed some bagels and spiced apple cider before decorating the table for dinner. And finally we started to prepare the turkey. Although in this year, the turkey was bought almost ready-made, we still had to bake it and it was quite a ceremony. Usually the turkey is Scott’s mother’s dish, so this year for Scott’s dad preparing the turkey was not a simple task. However he made it, as you can see in one of the pictures, and the ready-made turkey tasted deliciously. The great thing about Thanksgiving here is that it is a more open kind of celebration than our Christmas eve back home in Germany. That means that the extended family of Scott, including cousins, Uncles etc. were invited. Or even if some people may celebrate Christmas with their extended family back home; since there is only one holiday of Thanksgiving the main day is spent with the extended family and that made the difference from my vantage point. Back home, on Christmas eve, we probably wouldn’t invite friends, but here it is more or less common. So finally we were about 10 or 12 people and had way too much food. We had mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows, beans, salad and cranberry sauce (which is very common here as well). And for desert we had my desert and I guess more than six pies… way too much. So we could it all the leftovers for the remaining days. It was a great way to experience Thanksgiving for Carolin and me and we were very thankful to Scott to make that happen.
After Thanksgiving we had three more days to spend in LA. We went to the art museum LACMA, which I loved, especially the exhibition on Ken Price’s sculptures, although I am not a big fan of sculptures. As well we went out in LA, we visited the Walk of Fame, Santa Monica and Griffith Park to get a great view on the Hollywood sign. And finally I have to admit that LA is worth visiting. I’ve heard a lot about LA, a lot of people say it’s not a beautiful city and doesn’t have much to offer. Well, in my case I had great personal experiences, so I’m biased. Still, I think LA is so complex and creative and individual to some point, that one just has to be nosy and will find a lot of special things going on in that big city.
A final thing we did in LA: Talegating. That’s what you call the barbecue before a football game. In that case we went to the Talegating of a college game between UCLA and Stanford. I guess in hindsight we should actually have gone to the game as well, but we didn’t. Still, Talegating for this game was an event by itself. Scott’s little brother plays in the marching band, as I told earlier. So we went talegating the band’s parents and families. They had tents and tables with a whole lot of food. People start talegating in the morning and spend their whole day there, before the game starts in the afternoon. Now I thought the marching band would be a normal band, i.e. around 15 people or so. However only the French horns, which Scott’s brother is conducting, were more than 15 people and the whole band were probably around 200 people, that’s crazy. It was an amazing experience to be there, because this specific Talegating was probably one of the largest they have here. Tents all over, huge food parks and everything… they even had an alumni band.
What else to say. The weekend in LA was awesome, especially because we had the chance to experience some typical American things with real Americans! I’m so glad that I tried so hard to live with Americans in the very beginning. It was worth it.
