Snake... Thanksgiving Dinner of Champions

As you might imagine they don't really celebrate Thanksgiving here. In fact turkey is considered unclean so you can't find it here (unless you buy it from the international grocery store where they import it for a pretty penny.) In fact we had a normal day of school on Thanksgiving and it could of easily come and gone without realizing it was Thanksgiving. A group of the singles decided to get together to celebrate this past Thursday since we were famililess. To make this Thanksgiving memorable we choose to do something different, something adventurous and go out for cobra. We got directions to a place where someone else had been before and took off Thursday around 6:30. For some reason I was expecting a hole in the wall place with snakes hanging all around and perhaps dingy and dark. But the restaurant was nice, open, and very clean without a snake in sight. We had many variations of snake to choose from: sweet and sour snake, spicy snake, snake soup, snake with vegetables, etc. and we choose to share and try some of them all. One of the few channels we get here is Travel and Living and I think too many of us have been watching the show "Bizarre Foods," because we then asked if we could see the snakes and watch them kill them. They led us back through the kitchen to a small room where they pulled out a cobra from a metal box. They carefully caught hold of the snake's head and placed it in this contraption that would keep the cobra from biting or moving while they took a large knife and chopped the head off. After this they drained all of the blood out. Meanwhile both the head and the body continued moving for quite some time. They washed and de-skinned it in one large piece. While all of this was going on eight of us were crammed in this small back room with our cameras ready. They indulged our touristness and let us take pictures of it all. We went back to our table and began trying some of the different varieties of snake we had ordered. I wouldn't say that it was particularly delicious or that I want to go back again for more. But it wasn't bad either. Most of the types we had chosen were fried and kind of tasted like chicken. The soup was different, kind of like egg drop soup with finely chopped snake and tiny pieces of bone that had found their way in. We finished up dinner and headed for home. To end out the evening we gathered at one of our houses for dessert of cookies and ice cream. Nothing about our evening was very Thanksgivingy, but I was thankful to be with friends and for the adventure we shared that definitely brought us closer.

The next night, Friday, we were invited over for a Thanksgiving feast at the Hegles, a school family. The husband teaches computer and the wife teaches English and ESL, and their three kids go to BAIS. They went all out and bought a turkey and everybody brought different Thanksgiving dishes like stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, and other such foods. For dessert we had a delicious pumpkin pie along with some other things to choose from. There was quite the spread of food and it felt more like a Thanksgiving celebration.

Some added pictures for those who need proof. :)

The name of the restaurant.

Cobra- my snake of choice. :) They sure knew how to handle these guys.

The delicious spread of various snake dishes. That stuff on the right is the snake soup.

Me and some of the girls at the normal Thanksgiving dinner.