Thanksgiving in Finland

            This year I am in Finland, so there is no Thanksgiving Day here. So I decided to have Finland version Thanksgiving dinner here. My colleagues in Tampere University, School of Health Science are so international team. One of professor at our school used to collaborate with CDC and WHO many years, and nearly 20 years ago School started a special epidemiology Ph. D course for international students. At that time they wanted helping the epidemiology disaster in India, so they invited a couple medical doctors to be educated here to improve their research and study, then later that program expanded to Africa and East Europa. Occasionally, now every other year, few students who are medical doctors in their countries or epidemiological scientists are invited to the course. They stay here to take many courses in epidemiological field one year and going back to their own country to continue their research to complete for the doctoral dissertation. During their research period they, students and professors keep communicate with internet, telephone, or mail. Or sometime they are visiting each other. Finland is very interested country in that point doing this.
Anyway preparing Thanksgiving dinner course, I found many interesting differences, too. I could not find Cranberry source, pumpkin pure, and cornmeal at anywhere, but Lingonberry source and corn flour.
Instead of pumpkin pie I baked apple pie. Instead of cranberry source I used lingonberry source, which worked very well. My new friends here, Finnish, Italian, Mongolian, and Chinese, everybody had their first Thanksgiving turkey with big smile!