Thanksgiving is all about sharing. The huge turkey, the mashed potatos, the mashed squash, the cranberry sauce, the delicious stuffing (which is like a filling made of bread, celery, onions, etc.) and the pumpkin pie. All of this is shared between family and friends in a tipical American scene where everybody is passing the food bowls from one to another, like the movies.
Four hundred years ago the Pilgrims (early Europeans settlers of Plymouth, Massachusets) and the Native Americans shared their harvest and their turkeys (the local bird). On my trip to Boston I brought some Spanish almond nougat to my flatmate’s family as a sign of gratitude and his father especially liked it, because he was born in Spain and it reminded him to his childhood. Who knows, maybe Thanksgiving is evolving into an international food sharing celebration!
Apart from the Thanksgiving tradition, I utilized my trip to visit Boston and enjoy its architecture. There are many interesting buildings, like the brutalist City Hall, built in the sixties by Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles, or the renovation and extension of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which is like a genuine piece of jewellery, built by Renzo Piano in 2012. Nevertheless, the building I liked the most was the Gund Hall, which is the main building of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, conceived in the seventies by the Australian architect John Andrews. It’s interior is a great continuous diagonal stepped room where every student has its own personal work space and at the same time they all share the same space, getting inspired one from each other in every moment. When I visited this building I wished to be a student again and have the chance to study Architecture there…the only issue is that studying in Havard could be insanely expensive…
