Nothing brings a family together like food poisoning, amirite?: Thanksgiving in Uruguay

Nov 27, 2018

2 min read

It all started out so beautifully.

A trip to formally close our semester abroad as a program -- all 60+ of us making the trek to our program directors beautiful lemon farm in Uruguay for an American-style Thanksgiving dinner including turkeys imported from the U.S. and even homemade pumpkin pie.

Of course I brought my ukulele, so after gorging ourselves on food, we all sat around singing and laughing and feeling like a real family despite being so far from home.

Little did we know that the real fun would hit us all at approximately 2am the next day.

I can't remember the last time that I had food poisoning, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't near as funny as this was

Not in the moment of course, but in hindsight.

When we realized that all of the vegetarians made it out unscathed, we knew it was those imported turkeys that had gotten all of us good -- Argentines and Americans alike -- which almost makes me regret how proud we were at my table to have absolutely destroyed our turkey in comparison to the other tables.

Almost.

I even took a video proof of our picked-clean carcass, I was so proud.

After praying that our group of 60+ people would successfully make the 5 hour drive from Colonia to Punta del Este, nothing really seemed to matter after that.

We'd survived the worst, and couldn't stop laughing about the fact that it happened.

Even though almost nothing went as planned, we all had an amazingly memorable time and came away with a lot of things to be thankful for.