Eureka! The Turkey Has Landed

Within a few hours of Gigg's launch of the gobbler search, turkeys were detected in northern Thailand.  The young lady located a turkey farm out in the boondocks of nowhere northern Thailand. Imagine that, who would have thought that there existed Thai turkey farmers our there, grooming turkeys for the sole purpose of keeping all those farangs' bellies crammed with tryptophan filled coma inducing turkey on Thanksgiving?  Amazing!

Even more amazing is how on earth did this young lady succeed in finding turkey in Thailand where men of great stature such as His Excellency the Ambassador of Canada in Thailand had previously failed? Divine intervention? Predetermined destiny? Could very well be that there was always a turkey out there in the rural South East Asian sticks whose path in life, a path which had already been decided upon by a higher power before the unsuspecting bird's birth, had led the poor bird to lay bare in all it's glory on our Thanksgiving table. Perhaps, but let's not fool ourselves, this turkey came to us due to the raw and innate secretarial ingenuity and resourcefulness of a school secretary, and leave it at that.   

So, how did Gigg succeed when so many others had failed? By googling, that's how. It would be safe to say that Gigg was not the first one to resort to googling for the gobbler, but where everyone else had gone astray in their search, ingenious Gigg knew exactly what to look for.   Everyone who uses the web knows how to use Google to find stuff. Well, at least they think they do. Googling is pretty easy, but it’s also a bit of an art form. Some people just seem to have the ‘knack’ for finding things quickly, others take a fair bit of time. Gigg has the knack, the rest of us, including Mr. Ambassador of Canada to Thailand, are the others.

The trick is, if you google 'turkey' and 'Thailand', you'll get nowhere, or get a besquillion results bringing you nowhere, including blogs from misfits who can't find turkey in Thailand. However, by googling 'Turkey Farm Thailand', you get a mere 4,510,000 results, in .90 seconds. I kid you not, try it!

So, Gigg found the turkey, but next came the logistics of getting that fat bird from some farm way up in northern Thailand all way unto Ryan's Thanksgiving table in Bangkok.  The turkey could be flown or bussed in. Flying the bird in would take 3 hours and would incur a major expense; bussing it in would be cheaper but would take 14 hours.  Now having grown up in rural Manitoba, this farm boy knows for a fact that when an animal is about to be slaughtered, the more irate and perturbed the death-warranted animal is before meeting its demise on the chopping block, the tougher the meat from that animal ends up being. I know that if I were to spend 14 hours on a Thai bus, I would surely reach my destination a grumpy, tired and irritable mess. Now, is that to say that my meat would consequently be tough? Don't know and don't really need to go there because Ryan opted for air travel to bring his turkey home. Ryan wanted his turkey, and he wanted it now. The fact that he almost had to sell his first born to pay for the bird's flight down to Bangkok really didn't matter to him at that point. Could not let money, or lack of, get in the way of throwing an epic Thanksgiving Day feast that everyone would remember.  

And so it was, nothing less than a gargantuan affair, which included all the elements of a typical Canadian Thanksgiving, plenty of good food, lots of laughter, cold beer, sweet wine, women in the kitchen talking about feelings and fluffy things, men standing around in the living room, beer in hand, talking about the Blue Jays and carburetors. But like all Thanksgivings, the centrepiece of the affair was the carb-laden snooze inducing banquet, that drool-worthy spread of traditional dishes expected to make it to the Thanksgiving table, such as mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, some glazed and sweetened whatchamacallit vegetable, pumpkin pie, and of course, the main feature of the feast, the eminent super star food-guest of honour who flew in all the way from northern Thailand specifically for the occasion.

Yes, this poor bird had indeed made the biggest sacrifice by giving it's life for a greater cause, that is so that a few Canadian prodigal sons and daughters could conglomerate somewhere to properly celebrate all that is good in our lives, and sometimes even the bad that has helped us to grow. And so it was, as we gathered that festive second Saturday of October at Ryan and SunHee's house in suburban Bangkok, we ate and drank and laughed a lot, all the while reflecting on all we can be thankful for in our lives, something that is easily forgotten while pushing through the day-to-day grind, and so for that also, we are truly thankful.