DAY 11 - Thanksgiving!

Despite this being our very first Thanksgiving, our vegetarian and more spiritually inclined host family really wasn’t very concerned with celebrations in any way and so we had to look elsewhere for something to do. We briefly considered going to a Hare Krishna vegetarian feast ceremony of some sort that Judy recommended, but Kyle advised us against that and invited us to go to his favourite bar in Keeau instead where there would also be free food. So after only about half an hours work, we walked towards the street and started hitchhiking. Even though it seemed a bit more hopeless with three people, after not too much time we got picked up by an old couple in the most amazing car ever with two long benches in the open back, decorated entirely in red and yellow and with a little horse statue on the front hood.

It was a very windy but thoroughly enjoyable ride.

The bar turned out to be a little dingy room filled with old locals watching the American football game, drinking, eating and chatting, and something about the entire atmosphere made me feel like I was in a movie.

The two people on the right came over after a while having noticed that I was drawing them and Deborah was so kind as to write everybody's names on them and the lovely little message in the corner.

We stayed there for pretty much the entire day, the best thing being when complete strangers came up to us, gave us a hug and a smile and introduced themselves, such as the extremely lovely Sue and Chuck or indeed Deborah and Bob from the picture above. We played a bit of pool (which I once again lost for my team, both times) but eventually decided to go home, which proved to be harder than expected again. We’d arranged with two people Kyle knew there to bring us back but they somehow lost their keys, and the search was not being made easier by the very high and/or drunk elderly woman not getting into it at all and instead rambling on about how much she hated the French (‘fucking obnoxious! Never go there!’) and her turtle-faced son getting increasingly annoyed with her. They finally drove off with someone else to get their spare keys from home and we had to resort to good old hitchhiking, also made substantially more difficult by it being dark already, us being three people including a guy, and said guy not being able to stand still in the corner like we told him to and fooling around constantly, not impressing anyone with his terrible British accent (we love ya Kyle :)). Finally a guy stopped who recognized us from yesterday and dropped us right by our house again and on top of it gave us a free banana pie, which was again pretty sweet ending to the day.