Surfin’ USA

Thanksgiving, or the art of gaining and losing weight

As I mentioned, I was invited to an American family for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. We were 15 people, everything from an 15-months old girl to an impressive 101-years old great-grandma. I certainly enjoyed the family atmosphere with all its “noise and commotion”, as one of my hosts put it, and the Thanksgiving food was just great! There was turkey, several vegetables and different kinds of potatoes and everyone ate tons. Later we had pumpkin pie, which is also very delicious. As you might expect, I was so full afterwards, that I didn’t eat anything until Friday afternoon!
To work off some of the pounds I had put on over Thanksgiving, I accompanied Teiko, a postdoc here at UCI that I met last week at the bonfire, on a hike today. She has this great little booklet that lists various hike trails in Orange County and so we drove to Laguna Beach and hiked there for about 2.5 hours. We then proceeded a little further south to Dana Point, where we relaxed by the harbour and had some great bagels. This afternoon I also joined some other friends for Basketball, so hopefully most of my Thanksgiving pounds have been taken care of.
All in all it has been a great weekend so far, but unfortunately I haven’t gotten too much of my work for school done, so with project deadlines coming up next week, that is my rather boring agenda for Sunday…