Abu Dhabi Thanksgiving

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.