Thanksgiving

Ok, it's Wednesday now, but on Monday I decided to cook thanksgiving dinner!!  It was about 4pm when I decided, so it was quite spur of the moment.  I actually considered waiting a month and just saying that we're celebrating American thanksgiving, but alas... I thought it wise to be a true national.

So, here it is.

As you can see, I couldn't find a whole turkey, so I settled for turkey breast.  Alongside that, I made baked potatoes, carrots and onions, and steamed some broccoli.  We also had gravy and cranberry sauce with cinnamon.  I bought bread, but forgot to serve it with dinner.

I was excited to educate the Belgians about Thanksgiving.  Important things like "It's tradition to eat until you can't walk" and "next up, pumpkin pie with so much whipped cream you can't actually see the pie."


Unfortunately, we had no pumpkin pie.  Or squash.  Those things would have been nice, but oh well.

Enough about that.  Yesterday I took a rather long walk, then a tram ride, then a subway ride, then another walk, and ended up at...

Can you guess?

Ikea!!!

It was the same as the Ikeas in Canada, with the exception of the language difference and the usage of Euros instead of dollars.  I had a nice snack at the Ikea restaurant before looking through the Ikea.  It was an exciting time in my life.  I bought a little table to go next to the bed, and some hangers for the closet.

Oh, the most exciting part of the day yesterday?  I went to Hanlet Piano store.  I learned the options in terms of renting / rent to own / buying pianos etc.  I decided that it's cheapest (albeit maybe not the most convenient) to rent a practice room there.  It's only 4 Euros an hour, and if I get a card I can pay 20 Euros and get 6 hours (so it would be like buying 5 and getting one free).  I will choose that option because the piano I was going to rent for the house would have been not a very good quality one, and it would have been 300 Euros for a deposit, then 55 Euros a month following.  The pianos in their practice rooms are both grand pianos (well, maybe baby grand... my guess would be about 6').  One is Yamaha and the other is something that I forget.  Either way, that's the option I'm going to do.  I will go there today and get my fingers back in the habit.  It has been 12 days since I played piano now, and I feel rusty already.

In other news, there is one very small section of my arm that is still scabbed.  The rest of it just looks very dry and has arm dandruff if you will.  It is becoming less and less itchy which is great.  I put cream on it yesterday and that seemed to relieve much of the pain.  So, that is healing well and in about a week it won't feel like anything happened at all, which is nice.  August 31st was the last day my arm didn't feel like it was on fire, or look like it had just been attacked by something.

Alright, those are my updates for today.  I'm off to practice!!  Can't wait!!