Ah, Thanksgiving, that age-old American tradition that entails taking stock of what you have and showing your appreciation by over-indulging in it. Food, shopping, family, and football are the four pillars of an American Thanksgiving, and most Americans try to overload on all four to the point of discomfort over the course of a long weekend. So how is Thanksgiving as an expat in Zurich?
Start off with food: turkeys are hard to come by in Switzerland, as they aren’t particularly popular, and are really only eaten at Christmas-time. Pumpkin pie and cranberries are similarly hard to find, as are candied yams. All of these items can be rounded up or simulated with some effort and ingenuity, provided that you’re willing to spend a lot of money (a nine-pound turkey costs upwards of 70 francs, or almost $60). Thanksgiving here is best done potluck style, partly because the kitchens are small, and partly because footing the bill for an entire Thanksgiving feast would leave you with very little to be thankful for in your bank account.
Shopping. I think I’ve covered the sad, sad state of shopping in Zurich. High prices, poor selection, abominable opening hours. Maybe it’s for the best, so that we can still afford to buy all the food for the big meal.
A German friend was completely baffled by the Thanksgiving and Black Friday tradition, saying he couldn’t understand why people would go eat till it hurts and then go Christmas shopping in November on a day when the stores are completely crowded. Granted, I’ve always avoided Black Friday, but I can see why less crowd-averse people might brave the throngs to get a deal. And really, who is he to talk? Germans and Swiss leave their shoes out in early December, and St. Nick comes by and fills them with peanuts and candy. I’d say that eating shoe-nuts is much weirder than going bargain-hunting.
Family. Um, none of us has family living here, since we left them all behind. Football. Well, American football is pretty much an American phenomenon. One expat friend pays to watch streaming sportscasts on the Internet (but it’s live, so an evening game in the States translates into a middle-of-the-night pixellated computer window here). I have TiVo and a Slingbox, but I don’t watch football. Long weekend? Thanksgiving isn’t a Swiss holiday. Well, it’s not a holiday anywhere except for in the States.
So, how does a Swiss Thanksgiving compare to an American one? Food? Check, sort of. Shopping? Nope. Family? Nope. Football? Not really. Long weekend? Nope. But we ate our turkey (on a Tuesday), saw our friends, and celebrated in a modest salute to the Holiday of Excess.
Saturday night, a bunch of us went to the ETH Polyball, which is sort of like a giant prom thrown by the Swiss version of MIT. It is apparently “the largest ballroom dancing event in Europe,” attracting about 10,000 people every year, who dance salsa, rumba, waltz, cha cha, swing, and do whatever other ballroom dances that are out there that I never learned. It was quite a spectacle, partly because it was populated by fashion-challenged computer science nerds (one of the raffle prizes was a brand new, super-deluxe graphing calculator), and partly because Switzerland doesn’t have prom culture, so this is sort of their idea of what a formal dance should be like (apparently garnered from careful imitation of high school proms in American 80’s movies). Add in all the folks who take the ballroom part of “ballroom dancing” seriously, complete with hoop skirts and ball gowns, and you get a unique mix of Revenge of the Nerds, Sixteen Candles, and Gone With the Wind. Whoa.
Start off with food: turkeys are hard to come by in Switzerland, as they aren’t particularly popular, and are really only eaten at Christmas-time. Pumpkin pie and cranberries are similarly hard to find, as are candied yams. All of these items can be rounded up or simulated with some effort and ingenuity, provided that you’re willing to spend a lot of money (a nine-pound turkey costs upwards of 70 francs, or almost $60). Thanksgiving here is best done potluck style, partly because the kitchens are small, and partly because footing the bill for an entire Thanksgiving feast would leave you with very little to be thankful for in your bank account.
Shopping. I think I’ve covered the sad, sad state of shopping in Zurich. High prices, poor selection, abominable opening hours. Maybe it’s for the best, so that we can still afford to buy all the food for the big meal.
A German friend was completely baffled by the Thanksgiving and Black Friday tradition, saying he couldn’t understand why people would go eat till it hurts and then go Christmas shopping in November on a day when the stores are completely crowded. Granted, I’ve always avoided Black Friday, but I can see why less crowd-averse people might brave the throngs to get a deal. And really, who is he to talk? Germans and Swiss leave their shoes out in early December, and St. Nick comes by and fills them with peanuts and candy. I’d say that eating shoe-nuts is much weirder than going bargain-hunting.
Family. Um, none of us has family living here, since we left them all behind. Football. Well, American football is pretty much an American phenomenon. One expat friend pays to watch streaming sportscasts on the Internet (but it’s live, so an evening game in the States translates into a middle-of-the-night pixellated computer window here). I have TiVo and a Slingbox, but I don’t watch football. Long weekend? Thanksgiving isn’t a Swiss holiday. Well, it’s not a holiday anywhere except for in the States.
So, how does a Swiss Thanksgiving compare to an American one? Food? Check, sort of. Shopping? Nope. Family? Nope. Football? Not really. Long weekend? Nope. But we ate our turkey (on a Tuesday), saw our friends, and celebrated in a modest salute to the Holiday of Excess.
Saturday night, a bunch of us went to the ETH Polyball, which is sort of like a giant prom thrown by the Swiss version of MIT. It is apparently “the largest ballroom dancing event in Europe,” attracting about 10,000 people every year, who dance salsa, rumba, waltz, cha cha, swing, and do whatever other ballroom dances that are out there that I never learned. It was quite a spectacle, partly because it was populated by fashion-challenged computer science nerds (one of the raffle prizes was a brand new, super-deluxe graphing calculator), and partly because Switzerland doesn’t have prom culture, so this is sort of their idea of what a formal dance should be like (apparently garnered from careful imitation of high school proms in American 80’s movies). Add in all the folks who take the ballroom part of “ballroom dancing” seriously, complete with hoop skirts and ball gowns, and you get a unique mix of Revenge of the Nerds, Sixteen Candles, and Gone With the Wind. Whoa.
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