Thanksgiving – Philippine Style

It’s Thanksgiving day still in the United States, but already Friday here in the Philippines.  Of course, there is no Thanksgiving here in the Philippines, it is a uniquely American Holiday (yes, I know there is also a Thanksgiving in Canada celebrated in October).  However, for American ex-pats like me who live in the Philippines, most of us do celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving, Fourth of July and such.

For Thanksgiving, there are many restaurants that offer Thanksgiving meals, mostly restaurants that specifically cater to foreigners.  For instance, here in Davao there are a number of places to choose from if you want to eat out and enjoy the traditional Turkey meal:

• Claude’s – A french restaurant which is owned an operated by Claude, a frenchman.
• O’Flannagan’s – An Irish Pub which is owned and operated by Maurice, an Irish-American.
• Swiss Deli – A small European restaurant and deli, which is owned and operated by a group of European guys.
• Marco Polo Hotel – The nicest hotel in Davao, which tends to cater to foreigners.

So, as you can see, most of these places are owned and operated by foreigners from one part of the world or another.  Actually, I would say that most ex-pats tend to kind of “stick together”.  If there is a German Holiday, all the ex-pat places tend to celebrate it.  If a few days later it’s a French Holiday, again, the same places are celebrating!  It just works that way, I guess.

If you are like me, and you prefer the more traditional type of Thanksgiving where you do all the cooking at home, you can do that too!  Butterball Turkeys are readily available in several grocery stores in Davao.  The turkeys that you can get here are smaller than what you find in US stores, but they still taste the same!  We bought two turkeys for yesterday, each about 10 pounds.  We have a number of people that visited the house and ate Thanksgiving Dinner, though.  We cooked on Turkey in the oven, as we always did in the States, and the second turkey was cooked on a spit, over a bed of charcoal.  The decision was unanimous, the turkey cooked on the spit was far superior!  From now on, all of our turkeys will be cooked this way.

We also got most of the other traditional Thanksgiving items that we wanted: cranberry sauce, yams, etc.

Happy Thanksgiving to everybody!