Thanksgiving part two: Peshkopi style

The town I live in is in the northeast of Albania near the Macedonian border. The road to get there takes about 5 hours from the capital and the road (which is not that great, but getting better all the time) winds through the mountains. The trip is beautiful, but long and many Albanians and PCVs have this idea that Peshkopi is really far away, so not many people visit us. It is far away, but it is not really THAT far away, anyway, that is what I keep trying to tell people. . .

So, American Thanksgiving falls at a great time in Albania because usually it coincides with two (and this year three) holidays that are celebrated here. Meaning that we actually get a long weekend- longer than we would have in the US. Most people here had a full five days off- Friday to the following Tuesday and the Americans went ahead and took Wednesday and Thursday off, so basically it was a full week . . .

Taking advantage of this big holiday weekend, I invited some people to come up and extend the eating frenzy. Since they didn't have to be back to work on Monday it worked out. It was also Dylan's birthday this week, so we celebrated that as well and invited some of our Albanian friends to join us. My second Thanksgiving was almost as good as the first, if a bit more Albanian.
We still had all the standards (thanks to a care package or two- thanks Kenji!), but decided to go the slightly lazy rout and get some rotisserie chicken instead of cooking (and killing) our own turkey. We even stuck some sparklers in a pumpkin pie for Dylan . . .

It's funny, I don't think that many people in America have two Thanksgiving dinners, but for some reason I have had successive Thanksgiving dinner repeats for the past two years. Since we are so far away from the normal traditional things and our families, we unapologetically extend Thanksgiving into a full weekend with multiple meetings of different groups in several locations. I know some volunteers that went to as many as three dinners this year. We have a lot to be thankful for and I'm glad that I got to share this with so many good friends.