I will be honest, Thanksgiving in the UAE is not the same
thing as Thanksgiving in America. It has
a different feel to it, mainly, I would suspect, because we don’t have the same
routine we had back home. Oh, how I miss
the days of migrating from house to house to consume ungodly amounts of classic
southern food from each place only to collapse into a heap of bloated
uselessness on someone’s couch, to which I will quietly doze off in front of a
football game (oh yeah, I guess there is that whole seeing the family thing involved
in there somewhere). I had a colleague
from the UK inform me that he was going to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at
an American friend’s house. He asked if
there were any traditions that he should know about. I described exactly what I just stated here;
He said that was something he could definitely do. It’s weird actually explaining it to someone
from another country that doesn’t really know about the holiday because you
realize two things: the first is how disgusting our behavior is and two why we
are the fattest country on Earth. But,
both of which I am okay with right about now.
This year in talking with everyone, I got a sense that very few people are actually cooking. In
fact, I don’t actually know anyone that cooked.
Everyone seems to be going somewhere else, either to someone else’s
house that they know who cooked, or like us, couldn't resist trying out a Thanksgiving brunch.
Brunch has a different connotation here, and really I guess denotation
(definition) too for that matter. It
does not mean a meal between breakfast and lunch, or a blending of the two,
like it does back home. It is strictly a
lunch, a really, really, big lunch. It
usually runs for 4 hours, between noon and four. The easiest way to describe it is it is a
large buffet with unlimited cocktails, wine, beer, etc. As you would expect, the latter is what makes
them so popular. Most of the major
hotels and some of the restaurants all run a Friday brunch every Friday. People will get together a maximum of 6
people and brunch together (brunches are great and we have been to a few, but
they can be pretty pricey, so we find it best to go every so often). Well, you can see the obvious similarities
between this and Thanksgiving so some of the hotels and restaurants ended up
doing a Thanksgiving Brunch. We decided
on the Royal Meridian Hotel a place we were familiar with and liked (a buy one
get one coupon we had didn’t hurt either).
We filmed the whole experience so you can get a sense of
what is like going out in AD. Notice the
accents of the people we encounter like the cab driver and the waitress (Indian
and Filipino accents are pretty common here since these two countries make
up…uh…I don’t know 97% of the workforce
here; I’ll be talking about this in another post). This is our first stab at actually filming
things around town so we hope you like it, if so we will do more.
