Pete's Log: Happy Thanksgiving!

Entry #1411, (Life in General)
(posted when I was 28 years old.)

I got homesick for the first time on Wednesday, thinking about Thanksgiving. I still love it here in Munich, but it is somewhat striking to be more than 5000 miles from my family. It's actually 5352.37 miles (8613.80 km) according to Google Earth. I don't know how accurate that is, but I zoomed in real close on both end points and put markers right about where both places really are. The images at both ends were good enough to identify specific buildings.

Thanksgiving was nice, though, despite having to work. Sara and I had dinner at a nice Indian restaurant in Schwabing. I had chicken vindalu, which was nice and spicy. Today at work, Leo decided to make Weißwurst for lunch. It's a Bavarian thing. So Weißwurst and pretzels felt like a good Bavarian day-after-Thanksgiving thing to do...

I've been reading old log entries of recent. I've realized that I get much more satisfaction out of the detailed ones than out of the shorter ones. It's funny, because when I read one of the detailed ones, I usually think "yeah, I remember that!" but when I read one of the shorter ones, it's more of a feeling of "that sounds vaguely familiar, but I wonder what happened exactly." So I think that for the interest of future me, I'm going to actively strive to be more detailed. I've been doing this thing for eight years now (almost--I'm one week short) and I regret the low activity points. I know I did more than 45 entries worth of stuff in 2003-2005.

But things are looking good. Sara posted half a blog entry on our London trip, which reminded me of more things we did. Perhaps I'll post more on London when she posts the second half of her blog. And this will be entry 30 for 2006. And there's an entire month left, filled with Glühwein and other fun Munich christmas activities. There's also a Thanksgiving dinner at Sara's coming up on Sunday. It'll be fun to see what sort of feast we can come up with with German ingredients (Zutaten--another word I've tried to teach Sara). We should be able to find most of what we need...

So anyway, I am thankful for all my great friends and family. You're in my thoughts, even if you're on another continent. I'm thankful for the opportunity to live and work in Germany. I'm thankful that my new job has been fun and challenging. I'm thankful that my German is in good shape and getting constantly better. And I'm thankful to have found as good a friend as Sara in Munich.

By the way, long distance to the USA costs me about 2 cents a minute. I had fun calling several people yesterday to say happy Thanksgiving. But I stupidly left behind many phone numbers in my old American cell phone. So if you'd ever enjoy a phone call from Munich, email me your phone number!