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.

Party in Cerrik! What, what!?

Two of my site mates had birthdays this week, so we decided to host a party. The party itself didn’t actually differ that much from what we do every day. . . hanging out in the internet café, except that this time we had friends. About half of the other trainees came out for a drink. Also we had cake- well sort of.

Courtney and I decided that we wanted to try to bake a cake for the party. We discovered several challenges to baking here:
Unsure about ingredients- I think that this is baking powder, does this look like baking powder? Does anyone know the word for baking powder?
Ingredients not available- powdered sugar, brown sugar, vanilla etc. You may be able to get them somewhere, but I sure haven’t seen them and don’t know how to ask for them.
The oven is in Celsius and not so reliable . . .
Living in someone else’s house and using someone else’s kitchen- including only having very large cake pans and no measuring cups (we baked at Courtney’s house and I forgot my measuring cups at my house).

So we baked a cake. I made lemon curd (one of my favorite recipes) for the filling, but the frosting was a disaster. We didn’t have powdered sugar and with regular sugar it was . . . gross. And the cake didn’t really rise. I am going to go ahead and blame it on the baking powder (is this double acting???) and the fact that we didn’t put it in the oven right away. It tasted fine (and the filling was great!) but it was just kind of flat. I plan to try the same recipe again using my own (imported) baking powder, but I think that I will wait until I am in my own kitchen (only 6 more weeks!). I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Anyway, the party was great, the cake was an experiment and tasted good. The party was fun. Happy birthday Courtney and Karen!

U bësh një qind vjeç.-May you live to be 100 years old!