Thanksgiving in Nashville

Time has come for one of the biggest american holidays: Thanksgiving

For me known as a celebration of big turkey, family and cheer, I was lucky to get invited by a nice friend from University - Lindsay - to Nashville, Tennessee.

Before the trip, I got informed what will await me: Big family, great dinner, relaxing day, a 5 miles run and many other nice things...

So Tuesday morning, we left early to take the plane and were expected by Lindsays mother directly at the airport. First of all, she has the best guide to Nashville you can get is written by Lindsay herself!! A great review of sights, bars, caffees, country music places and just everything ;).To the left you see Lindsay and her mother Missy at Thanksgiving preparations - lovely!

In these days, I got to experience a very different side of the US than New York. Located in the mid-east, being a "Southern" state it is a hilly area with a lot of woods whose leaves have mostly already fallen down. Nashville itself is a wide-spread town with many nice sights and most of all: Home to Country Music - a very cool thing!!

That brings me to the little Sightseeing I have done... Lindsay took me downtown to get some grasp of this amazing country music feeling; apart from the impressive Country Music Hall of Fame which hosts not only guitars and suits of all great singers, even Elvis Presley's (he started his career in Nashville) golden Cadillac is there!!!

Just one block further, is Broadway of Nashville, the street where the heart of country music beats (literally!) - all day long you hear great artists performing, you can hop from one bar to another, enjoy some "Flush" (very sweet tasty stuff, similar to turkish honey - if that helps :D) and when the road ends you face the stadion of the Tennessee TItans (on the other side of the river...).

Apart from sports and music, Nashville is - so I was told - named as "Athenes of the South" (just checked, its really more south than Athenes). However, it got this name thanks to its good universities and numerous schools, and so they set up an original scale Parthenon with a statue of "Athene" inside for the 100-year-anniversary.  You can compare it to the original one (guess which one is which ^^).

So time to come back to the original topic - thanksgiving.

Short - it was great!

Longer - still great ;). I was welcomed totally warm by Lindsay's big family (25 heads have been present) and came to enjoy a great meal - including of cause turkey! Even though the party took place at somebody elses house, Lindsay's mother missy already started to cook for the festival two days before (also always with the motivation to have leftovers - a great thing)! 

On the day itself, a fun run as fundraising event took place where I took part - very happy that my recovery is going so well that I can particapte in a 5 miles run (and have a reasonable time ^^). After that, some more cooking and relaxing during the day. The party itself started in the late afternoon; all family met at one's place where tables have been prepared, turkey was roasted and the dog left outside (our meal!!). After friendly introductions, compliments about Vienna and reassuring that people from Austria barely watch "Sound of Music" we took our places which have been lovely marked by shaped name tags. They were important as we were split up into groups of Pilgrims, Indians and Turkeys for the following family trivia with questions of all kind about the US and thanksgiving and one for me (what's Erntedankfest? ). It was a lot of fun and it was great to see the family come together, as many are dispersed all over the US (mainly the "young adults", as their table was called) and the meals were just delicious!

After lifting myself up the next morning (which was not so easy after the meals...) I had another premiere: Clay shooting

Before I go on... i was asked to confirm that the south is not all crazy about guns, not everybody is a member of the NRA and so on.. yeah that's all true! We just did some recreational shooting on the family-owned farm land. Was a nice experience with Lindsay's dad, brother and a friend who shot for the very first time (I got my austrian army training ^^).

There are still many other things we have done, but I will keep it like that not to overwhelm you.

Thanks  again to Lindsay and her lovely family for making my first thanksgiving an unforgetable experience.

Cowboy Peter say's hello (i didn't bought that stuff... )