My first opportunity to celebrate a festival in Australia turned out to be an entirely American festival. And I was lucky enough to experience two of them! I'm talking about Thanksgiving. One official Thanksgiving celebration, with lots of traditional Thanksgiving food like turkey and yams. The other was a Mexican Thanksgiving party, which was in fact a celebartion of my housemate's anniversary of moving in to his house, and it just happened to fall around Thanksgiving. And Mexico is viewed as an antonym of the USA I guess. And it probably created a good cover story for drinking beer and tequila for 15 hours and playing loud Mexican music.
Mexican Thanksgiving solely involved Mexican foods and drinks and games. This meant 3 different types of tequila (one with the traditional scorpion preserved in the bottom), Corona, nachos, burritos, a piñata, sombreros, wearing shirts with just the top button fastened, saying "essay" a lot, putting Riche Valen's La Bamba on repeat for a few hours and cheering each time it came on, tabasco sauce on many things and in many drinks, and limes. Kilograms of limes. We played poker for most of the night and drank. We fought with the piñata scattering sweets everywhere. A few weeks later I still found some sweets from the piñata behind the TV despite a thorough clean of the lounge the day after. And disturbingly the piñata was an effigy of a what looked like a little girl. Scary. It may have been a clown but it had long hair and a distinct lack of clown make up or clown regalia. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the piñata itself, but of someone giving it a right hook and leaving only the hair.
I woke up the next morning face down on the sofa, with an awful headache, the later stages of photophobia, an aversion to moving any part of my body and the first 10 seconds of La Bamba playing on loop in my head.
Arriba!
A week later, I was celebrating Thanksgiving, but in a very different way. This was at a house in an area called "the Shires" in the south of Sydney. It was held at the family home some American friends of my aunt. They live by the coast, and their beautiful house overlooks the sea. This meant that there was a wealth of wildlife to see and this picture of a bird on their patio shows how close we could actually get. I was able to stroke the feathers of the bird in the pictures.
The day was spent eating different delicious food, talking to all the people there, taking photos and enjoying some homebrewed alcohol. One of the guys that was there brewed and sold his own alcohol and another guy worked with his dad importing rum. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to try any special rum (I was told about this bottle they had which was worth 1000s of dollars), but was able to drink a lot of excellent home brewed cider and lager.
I had such a lovely day and it was nice to be reminded of an wholesome, caring image of the USA that's rarely portrayed in the media apart from in cheesy, pink and fluffy, saccharine heavy movies.
Note: And then I'ma end this post with a famous song title quote from this film but I'll write "I'm sooo ronrey, oh so ronrey" and let people guess what I mean. Fuck yeah. :)
Mexican Thanksgiving solely involved Mexican foods and drinks and games. This meant 3 different types of tequila (one with the traditional scorpion preserved in the bottom), Corona, nachos, burritos, a piñata, sombreros, wearing shirts with just the top button fastened, saying "essay" a lot, putting Riche Valen's La Bamba on repeat for a few hours and cheering each time it came on, tabasco sauce on many things and in many drinks, and limes. Kilograms of limes. We played poker for most of the night and drank. We fought with the piñata scattering sweets everywhere. A few weeks later I still found some sweets from the piñata behind the TV despite a thorough clean of the lounge the day after. And disturbingly the piñata was an effigy of a what looked like a little girl. Scary. It may have been a clown but it had long hair and a distinct lack of clown make up or clown regalia. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the piñata itself, but of someone giving it a right hook and leaving only the hair.
I woke up the next morning face down on the sofa, with an awful headache, the later stages of photophobia, an aversion to moving any part of my body and the first 10 seconds of La Bamba playing on loop in my head.
Arriba!
A week later, I was celebrating Thanksgiving, but in a very different way. This was at a house in an area called "the Shires" in the south of Sydney. It was held at the family home some American friends of my aunt. They live by the coast, and their beautiful house overlooks the sea. This meant that there was a wealth of wildlife to see and this picture of a bird on their patio shows how close we could actually get. I was able to stroke the feathers of the bird in the pictures.
The day was spent eating different delicious food, talking to all the people there, taking photos and enjoying some homebrewed alcohol. One of the guys that was there brewed and sold his own alcohol and another guy worked with his dad importing rum. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to try any special rum (I was told about this bottle they had which was worth 1000s of dollars), but was able to drink a lot of excellent home brewed cider and lager.
I had such a lovely day and it was nice to be reminded of an wholesome, caring image of the USA that's rarely portrayed in the media apart from in cheesy, pink and fluffy, saccharine heavy movies.
Note: And then I'ma end this post with a famous song title quote from this film but I'll write "I'm sooo ronrey, oh so ronrey" and let people guess what I mean. Fuck yeah. :)
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