Happy late/early Thanksgiving!

Jean freaking out over
the cost of the turkey

Late for you, early for us.  Obviously there's no Thanksgiving here in Norway, so Tyler and the guys at his office don't get a long weekend like back home.  So while y'all got to celebrate yesterday, we'll be having our own Norwegian version of Thanksgiving tomorrow.  But there will be no turkey on our table.  Why?  Well, first, I couldn't find any whole turkeys at the store.  But earlier this week my friend Jean and I went to a different supermarket for the first time that was supposed to have more American food, thinking this would be our best bet for locating any Thanksgiving staples.  While we found no cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie filling, we did find turkeys!  Whole turkeys.  20lb. whole turkeys.  $300 20lb. whole turkeys!  I kid you not - 1600 to 1800 NOK for turkeys just over 20lbs.  That's about $300.  We took pictures to prove it thinking no one would believe us.

The label from one of the turkeys.

Needless to say, while I love a good triptophan coma as much as the next American on Thanksgiving, I easily thought of much better things to do with that $300.  So as it stands our Thanksgiving menu tomorrow will be the following:

• Deer tenderloin (with a red wine reduction provided by Rett)
• Sweet potato casserole
• Green bean casserole (no French's fried onion rings though *sigh*)
• Asparagus (courtesy of Rett); and
• Home-made boller (Norwegian pastries that we're going to try making for the first time)

Plus some nice bottles of red wine.  After dinner we're meeting up with our friends Lucas and Jean and two of their friends from out of town and we're all heading to the IceBar here in Oslo!  Not that it will really be much colder in there than it is outside now, but it will be fun and neither Tyler or I have been in an ice bar before.  More on that later.

This Sunday is the lighting of the big Christmas trees here in Oslo; they always do this on the first Sunday of Advent.  There are two big tree lightings that we've heard about: at one they'll be handing out gingerbread and mulled wine; the other is closer to the palace, is sponsored by the Salvation Army (yes, they have that here) and they'll have a lot of carols for everyone to sing.  Very curious to hear what Norwegian carols sound like.  Here's a video I took of some of the decorations they've put up here in our area that they just lit up in the past few days:

They also opened the Oslo Christmas Market or "Julmarked" this week and today I went with Lauren to check it out.  She works for Exxon in St. John's and came out just for 3 days to train the guys on some new software.  We thought it would be a fun place to check out before she flies back home tomorrow, plus it is literally just around the corner from our place - very nice.  There was LOTS of fun stuff to check out and most of it is made by artisans or companies here in Norway :-) There was a cute train display in the largest tent - that's Lauren in the picture.  I'm not going to go into too much detail for fear of ruining some Christmas presents, but here is the link for the market if you want to learn more.

Here's a picture of the Julmarked in front of Oslo City Hall and you can see our local tram going by (I did not take this picture, its from their website, but SO pretty)

And last but not least, below are a few other "American" things I've found at some of the stores over here.  I got a kick out of them and thought y'all would too ;-)