Students abroad celebrate American holiday tradition

  Photo courtesy of Jessica Wilson UCLA foreign exchange
students in Sweden and Denmark gathered at the Grand Hotel in Lund,
Sweden to celebrate Thanksgiving last week.

By Megan Dickerson
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

LUND, SWEDEN “”mdash; It took four days for UC Santa Barbara
student Jackie Binger to locate a Thanksgiving turkey in
Copenhagen, Denmark. She and a dozen other education abroad
students searched Danish grocery stores, gathering potatoes, green
beans and Libby’s pumpkin pie filling, and in the end, found
a boneless turkey.

“I wasn’t even sure how to cook it,” said
Binger, a third-year law and society UCSB student. “Usually
my mother and I have to soak it, and there’s a whole process
we have to go through. We just decided “˜OK, we’ll just
cook it longer,’ and it will still be good.”

Starting Thursday evening and culminating in an all
UC-Scandinavia dinner Saturday, UC students at Denmark’s
University of Copenhagen and Sweden’s Lund University
celebrated the all-American holiday with non-traditional
ingredients and without dwelling on the Sept. 11 attacks that still
dominated international front pages.

Students abroad spent hours finding the right food to cook and
the correct decorations to satisfy their homesick hunger and
expectations for a normal American festivity while in a foreign
country.

“When I think of Thanksgiving, I think of eating so much
food I can hardly move,” said Jessica Wilson, a UCSB student
at Lund who helped organize Saturday’s Thanksgiving dinner.
“You know, unbutton the pants a little, digest, just so you
can eat more leftovers later.”

While the Thanksgiving menu is traditional, some students say
they are not sure why adhering to customs is so important.

Britt Bringleson and her Swedish friend Ivar Ivarson decided to
dine at a restaurant Thursday. They ate duck.

“After we had searched nearly every restaurant in Lund for
a place to eat turkey, Ivar asked me “˜do we really have to
eat turkey? Is it that important?'” said Bringleson, a
UC San Diego graduate who is completing work in economics at Lund.
“It kind of made me mad for a second. Of course you eat
turkey. But it’s really hard to understand why.”

Transplanted to Scandinavian residence halls or host family
homes, exchange students said the quintessential American holiday
gains new attributes. Candied yams might utilize colored
marshmallow candies instead of cooking marshmallows, while turkey
might be paired with glogg ““ Swedish spiced wine ““
instead of cider.

In the absence of American family and in the presence of new
traditions, exchange students said Thanksgiving becomes a process
of food selection.

“Making pumpkin pie is really a hassle here,” said
Supakorn Chanchaowanich, a fourth-year UCLA electrical engineering
student who celebrated Thanksgiving with eight UC students at
Sparta, one of the Lund residence halls. “We ended up making
cheesecake and brownies instead,” Chanchaowanich said.

Across the Oresound Bridge, which connects Sweden and Denmark,
many UC students in Denmark celebrated Thanksgiving in
Nørrebro, a Copenhagen neighborhood formerly dominated by
working class Danes and now home to university students and
immigrants.

Close to 80 percent of Nørrebro’s immigrant
population is Muslim, and after Sept. 11, many took to the narrow
streets to light firecrackers, wave flags and dance, according to
exchange students and local papers.

“A friend of mine contacted the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen
after the attacks and just mentioned that he lived in
Nørrebro,” Binger said. “(The embassy
representative) told him not to speak English in the streets. The
rest of the city was okay ““ just not
Nørrebro.”

On Thursday, when students celebrated Thanksgiving in
Nørrebro, few spoke of the attacks. Binger said she, as well
as other students, have not felt unsafe since October.

They have returned to a sense of normalcy, some say, sharing a
traditional turkey day meal. The students watched football after
dinner ““ European football, that is ““ and joked about
having a kid’s table in the hall.

The same sense of normalcy ruled Saturday’s gathering at
the Lund Grand Hotel, a stately building in the city’s
center. The hotel’s restaurant manager, Johan Bargos, a chef
who immigrated to Sweden from Hungary more than two decades ago,
took special interest in the meal’s authenticity because his
son lives in the United States.

Keith Nelson, the director of the UC Study Centers in Copenhagen
and Lund as well as a UC Irvine history professor, delivered cans
of cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie filling to the hotel. For a
California final touch, the hotel staff decorated the dining hall
with palm trees.

“As far as Sept. 11, the thought didn’t really cross
my mind more than once the whole evening ““ which is a good
thing,” said Andy Lengyel, a fourth-year UCLA electrical
engineering student at Lund.

“But I definitely did give thanks for the fact that my
family has been safe up to this point. It was more happy thoughts
than sad,” he continued.

Though the events of Sept. 11 remain fresh in their minds, most
students at the two campuses said it was the food, not thoughts of
terrorists, that dominated their holiday abroad.

“I was puzzled a bit as to whether even to mention the
attacks during my speech,” said Nelson, who gave a short
message of thanks before the meal at the Grand Hotel.

“My impression is that the students are very sensitive to
the concerns of people at home. But they also have a strong desire
to focus on the opportunity they have here and to not be
intimidated ““ or inhibited ““ by the threat of terrorist
action,” he said.

In the end, no official mention of the attacks was made. After
students finished a dinner of mushroom soup, turkey, mashed
potatoes, peas and carrots, the lights of the grand hall
dimmed.

Without a sound, the hotel’s serving staff paraded around
the room with a pumpkin pie in one hand and a sparkling fire
cracker in the other. Fireworks are a Swedish tradition, though
many Americans at the dinner thought the sparklers referenced the
Fourth of July, Nelson later said.

The cooking staff, as many students noted with amusement, had
topped the pumpkin pie with fresh strawberries. It was different,
they said, but not bad.

“Here, you don’t have the day off, so you’re
not celebrating it because of that. You do all this work to prepare
for Thanksgiving just to relax and have fun and remember what
you’re thankful for,” Wilson said after dinner.