postcard 10: the thanksgiving special

five Americans, two Belgians, two Croatians, two Australians and a Columbian walk into Friendsgiving.

Croatia doesn’t have turkeys, apparently. Our new American friends have scoured all six(!) grocery store chains in Pula for a full bird, showing butchers photos and working Google translate. What comes out of the oven isn’t off a magazine cover, but it is turkey, just the breast, and it’s perfect. The Americans are outnumbered by expats from all over: Belgium, Australia, Columbia. There’s even a few Croatians here and it’s pretty much everyone’s first Thanksgiving experience. Despite that fact, everyone seems to have understood the assignment perfectly. There’s stuffing and green bean casserole, sweet potatoes and potatoes au gratin and mac n cheese (you know that one was me). Dessert is a trip across the globe: tiramisu and Belgian chocolate mousse, Columbian flan and Croatians lemon cakes.

I’m in awe of the warmth our new friends exude, creating a community out of those of us without one. I’m not great at understanding accents and add in background noise? I’m hopeless. I smile and nod and even though it’s a little overwhelming to my introverted self, there’s Christmas carols and we go around the table and say what we’re grateful for and it’s all the same exact thing: these wild and weird circumstances that brought us here together. Our new friends queue up Alice’s Restaurant, an obscure, 18-minute Thanksgiving tradition Topher picked up working carpentry jobs and nobody else has ever heard of and it feels like serendipity.

We’ve roped our new friends into a dinner experience I’ve had on my list since we’ve moved here. An award-winning goat cheese operation offers farm tours and dinners on weekends and we reserve our spots online and drive thirty minutes outside town, down a long and winding country road in the moonless darkness. We pull up to the address Google Maps indicates and the entire place is dark. We wander up and down the road with our phone flashlights, gawking at the stars, and finally call the number on the confirmation email. A few minutes later a man and big white dog turn on the porch light and emerge from the house. There’s been a mix-up with the reservation system and they weren’t expecting us, but he leads us into the cheese making building anyways. Turning on the lights as he goes, we learn that he’s the owner of the 300-goat-herd. He’s got 10 dogs, including the giant Maremma shepherd siblings that flank us, and he points out the machinery he uses to make the cheese, the wheels aging on shelves, and then deposits us into a cold dining room where he presents us with big chunks of various cheeses and scrounges up some bread and olive oil to accompany.

Despite having interrupted his Sunday evening, he’s jovial and sits with us as we eat cheese and pepper him with questions. He tells us about his former life in Slovenia as a lawyer and shows us the videos of his dogs that went viral. They roll over on their backs for tummy rubs and shove their giant faces close to ours to demand pets as we talk. He offers to make us scrambled eggs—he does have chickens after all—and we drink wine and eat eggs covered in olive oil, sopped up with the best warm bread and it’s the most random night but we’re all smiling like giddy kids the whole drive home.

We wander through a non-descript door into the tax office downtown and get our ID numbers (not to be confused with our still pending visas) and at the mall I blunder my way through buying new tennis shoes and it may not seem like much, but I marvel that it’s only been two months and yet, we’re already doing things that back home I wouldn’t have fathomed being brave enough to do.

And for that, I'm so thankful.

-Mikaela