Lola and Linda's birthday, Thanksgiving meal no. 1

Tuesday night I was invited to my neighbor's house up on the 6th floor (I'm on 3) for a birthday/early Thanksgiving celebration. They are all going out of town Thursday, and there were two birthdays in their circle of friends, so we had a party on Tuesday night. The party was hosted by the residents of flat 6A in my building: a couple from Columbia, Lola & Fernando, and Heidi, who is from Canada. Lola and Heidi are teachers at the Canadian International School which is located near the new AUC campus where I teach.

Our hosts have decorated their home for the holidays, and also provided turkey, sangria, wine, dessert, good music (an ABBA DVD was playing, and some Columbian music) and wonderful conversation. Some pictures follow. Honestly, I took most of these so my Mom would know I was eating well and around real Christmas decorations at this time of year...

A picture with the Christmas tree.

Here is the turkey, salad and wine. It was all delicious!

Here is Fernando.

A picture of me with Lola.

Here are all 3 hosts: Lola, Heidi and Fernando:

And the birthday cake. It was Linda's birthday and Lola's birthday.

Linda & her husband are from Sweden. Also attending was Heidi from Canada; Lola, Fernando and one of their friends who are all from Columbia; an Egyptian; Angus from Poland; Alessia from Italy; 2 more Canadians; Laura (I think) from China, and actually I was the only American at this Thanksgiving celebration.

We sang Happy Birthday to Linda & Lola in English first, and then someone mentioned how many languages were in the room. So they sang it in Swedish before I got the camera rolling, but then it was sung in:

Polish:

Italian:

Chinese:

German:

And finally, Spanish:

Pretty cool, eh?

A nice time. I have an invite to another Thanksgiving meal tomorrow (Thursday, which is yom el khameese in Arabic) in Dokki and then I am going to Alexandria on Friday, if I can get a seat on the train, en shallah. So more stuff to post then.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you in the US!