Hungary for Turkey

On Thanksgiving I ate turkey. This would be less remarkable if I were in the States, experiencing Thanksgiving with everyone else. But turkey is uncommon in France, which made it remarkable -- and, I'm convinced, not coincidental -- that my office cantine served dinde on Thursday. There were no sweet potatoes, green beans or gelatinous canned cranberry, though. For that I had to wait until dinner that night, when we had friends over for a Franco-American Thanksgiving, featuring poulet rather than turkey. A minor pre-dinner plumbing crisis in the kitchen delayed the meal, and seemed to set off a series of minor catastrophes (undercooked potatoes, dropped plates, insufficiently sweet mulled wine) that is sure to make our first Thanksgiving one to remember, just not in the Norman Rockwell sort of way. The next day we hopped a flight to Budapest for our last EasyJet weekend getaway of the year. (That makes three in the last month, with five more planned for the first half of next year. Seriously, we should become spokespeople.) Now, just two more weeks of lawyering and tutoring separate us from our first trip back home since moving here in January.

Even more than Thanksgiving, the deep connection between food and home was underscored shortly after arriving in Budapest. As we were walking around, getting a lay of the city and looking for a place to have dinner, all of a sudden Ashley yelled. There, down the street, was a Vapiano. Vapiano is a chain of pizza, pasta and salad restaurants at which we had many a meal in DC -- so much so that that's where we're meeting some friends when we return in a few weeks. Ashley didn't scream because it just so happened that she had been wanting a salad (although she had been). It was because she saw a familiar face in a strange place. And familiar it was: the food and the experience, from the menu to the color of the stools to the bowl of gummy bears at the cash register, was as we remembered it in DC. In short, it was proof that it's not the food per se but the familiarity of it that makes for such a powerful connection. Indeed, it'd be tough for Ashley or me to defend on grounds of taste alone our love of gelatinous canned cranberry or spinach dip from my parents' grocery store, respectively.

This has gotten me thinking of our visit to the States not in terms of the places we'll visit but of the the food we'll eat.

- 12-15 December: Vapianoville
- 15-26 December: cream-cheese country (aka cheese-steak land), with a weekend trip to bagelburg
- 26-30 December: spinach-dip falls, with a quick trip to stadium-mustard town
- 30 December to 2 January: city of deep-dish pizza, from which we fly back to cheeseland.

Who's Hungary? Speaking of which, here are photos from cold, snowy, paprika-laden Budapest:

-- MBB