December 3 , 2003

When Thanksgiving Equals Setting Fire to Wessex Hall . . .



As you can probably tell by the title, Thanksgiving was a bit eventful this year. Since they don’t celebrate turkey day here in England, Adam Watson and I thought it would be great to fix our own food. Of course, we could have gone to the dinner planned by the study abroad office, but neither of us had 16 pounds (roughly $24) on us. Since Adam and I both

think that sweet potatoes are the best things on earth, we thought that making sweet potato casserole would be a fantastic idea.

However, sweet potatoes apparently don’t exist in England. Of course, they have every other kind of potato as is evident in cafeteria meals where they serve you five different types of potatoes. He finally happened across a little corner grocery where the owner assured him that he had sweet potatoes and sold Adam four of them. They weren’t sweet potatoes. In fact, we’re still not entirely sure what they were aside from the fact that they were some kind of tuber. When we sliced them up, some of them also displayed some odd black squiggles and specs. Some of them did make up some interesting patterns, though. I’m pretty sure one of them resembled Evan from “Joe Millionaire” (aka- Phil White), but that’s neither here nor there.

Despite the misshapen tubers, we followed Adam’s mom’s recipe diligently, and after an hour of tedious and painstaking work we had concocted something that looked like sweet potato casserole. Naturally, we were quite proud of ourselves.