Today is Thanksgiving, and let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to find turkey and cranberry sauce in the far corners of the Earth than it once was.

I first moved abroad as an adult in 1984, when I took a fellowship in Santiago, Chile. We lived modestly then, and obtaining a frozen turkey was nearly impossible. So I remember how luxurious it felt to go to the local Sheraton Hotel for a multicourse Thanksgiving meal. Whatever it cost, and it was a lot for my small pockets, it was worth it.

Then came a few years in Peru, where my recollection is we had to make do with a few Thanksgivings with a roast chicken sitting in for a turkey. At least, there were plenty of sweet potatoes (for you non-American readers, they are a staple of the Thanksgiving meal). Peru is the original home of the potato.

Things got interesting in Nicaragua, where I moved in late 1991, just as the country moved out of the socialist Sandinista era.

On arrival, I heard woeful tales from compatriots of the scrawny local breed of turkey, or chompipe. You had to buy them alive. I’d never killed and plucked a turkey before. And the local practice called for forcing alcohol down the fowl’s gullet to make it woozy, then ringing its neck. This held little appeal.

Luckily, by my first Thanksgiving, the local supermarket had a batch of frozen turkeys. I snatched one up and began ringing friends to come over.

To my horror, I later walked in the kitchen and saw the housekeeper preparing the turkey in a very unique Nicaraguan way. She was pressing mashed garlic into the skin and slathering it with ketchup, ready to throw in the oven. Luckily, I was able to clean it up before baking.

That year began an annual tradition around our house of inviting as many Americans as convenient over for Thanksgiving. In the early years, it involved carting cranberry sauce and bags of walnuts home with us every time we visited Stateside, even half a year before Thanksgiving.

In China, where we arrived in 2003, making a big Thanksgiving dinner has gotten super easy. Today, we’ll have turkey and an onion-cranberry dressing. There are plenty of sweet potatoes about. And the local supermarkets that cater to foreigners, Jenny Lou’s and April Gourmet, carry all manner of Thanksgiving goodies, including cans of pumpkin for pies. Local restaurants do a big business catering to the Thanksgiving trade.

And unlike in Nicaragua, you don’t need to take your turkey with local condiments, like ketchup. It doesn’t come with oyster sauce on it. Nor do you get Moo Goo Gai Turkey. It’s just plain old turkey with stuffing. The way I like it.

The only thing missing is the traditional  Detroit Lions-Dallas Cowboys football game on TV. But then, I can probably find a way to catch it on the internet these days.

Some friends chuckled the other day as I rummaged through the Sunday Times of India and pulled away an eight-page section entitled “matrimonials.”

It is a little window into India, shedding light on the economic and social hopes of the families of would-be brides and grooms who take out personal ads to look for marriage partners.

Forget about the usual acronyms of U.S. personal ads, with the heavy overlay of sexual innuendo and orientation.

In India, the lingo is about a transaction of a different nature. Potential mates are described as “boys” and “girls” even if they are in their 30s and 40s. Women are described as “very qualified” and “issueless,” though I can only guess at the latter. Ads boast of salaries, graduate degrees, skin complexion and resident status abroad. Parents seek “alliances” rather than marriages.

Here are some examples:

“Looking for a very Beautiful, Fair, Slim and compatible girl with family values. The girl should be at least 5’5” Tall and from a respectable and well-connected family for Handsome Punjabi Khatri boy 38/6ft/US citizen, Electrical and Computer Engineer and Masters of Management from Top US Schools, President and CEO of his own Multiple Business. The Boy is on a very short visit to Delhi.”

Hmm. A CEO on the prowl. And here’s one aiming for “status.”

“Alliance invited for Khatri Sikh Clean Shaven Feb ‘78/5’8” MBA working with MNC from educated status family. Seeks educated bride from status family.”

Okay, so the guy can handle a razor. Welcome to the club.

Then there’s this potential bride on the auction block, if you can figure it out:

HOMELY MATCH for personable boy 34/178/9LPA MGR PSU Issueless Divorcee never lived married life NO DOWRY

“Homely” must be code for “not a party girl.” The numbers are trickier. I guess it’s age 34, 1 meter 78 centimeters tall, earning “9 lakh per annum.” The latter is a wild guess. The South Asians use the term lakh for the unit of ten thousand one hundred thousand, just as Chinese use “wan” for the unit of ten thousand. Question is, is that dollars or rupees? I’m still pondering the “issueless.” Does that mean “ex-husband not chasing me with an axe?”

Eating habits and religion play a big role in the ads. Here’s one seeking a special kind of girl.:

“Kashmiri Pandit handsome boy 27/5’9” Major Indian Army seeks b’ful girl ht. should be 5’4” convent graduate Punjabi Khatri girl.”

And there’s an ad for a diminutive vegetarian:

“Alliance invited for fair charming veg. homely KKK girl 27/5’2” convent educated B.Come(H) belonging to well estd.busi. family of Kolkata.”

Convent educated. Wonder if she’d like a Kashmiri Pandit Army major? But I hope that KKK doesn’t mean what it would mean in the States.

This final ad employs a word that one would never find  in U.S. personals:

“Christian Parents invite alliance for spinster daughter, 34 yrs 5’4”, M.Com MBA, Permanent Resident of Canada, employed with bank. Visiting India in December.”

In common usage, a spinster is a woman who has remained single far beyond the conventional age for marrying.

I hope all the pretenders find their “qualified” partners, and that they be slim, clean shaven, holding Ph.Ds and with green cards.

Just up the road from the hill station of Dharamsala, India, is a settlement known as McLeodganj. It is the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

It’s also on the international travelers’ circuit, and a visitor strolling around town crosses paths with many Western backpackers with dreadlocks and shawls bearing the Hindu symbol for “Om.” The settlement is full of coffee bars offering lattes and internet cafes, as well as yoga studios and open air kitchens offering cooking courses.

There was a time that the settlement was called “Little Lhasa” because the number of Tibetan exiles living here. Behind a main temple is the hidden compound is the most famous of them, the Dalai Lama, the most revered leader of the Tibetan Buddhists.

Fluttering above many buildings here is the Free Tibet flag, and the place has the quaint air of a tiny international capital, although there is no territory to rule.

Probably the oldest store in McLeodganj belongs to the Nowrojee family. It is at the main bus stop. The sign above the entrance notes that it was established in 1860, back when the region was a hill station for British seeking to escape the heat of the northern Indian plains.

“When I grew up here, it was a sparsely populated town,” Parvez Nowrojee, one of the proprietors of the store, tells me. “It did not have much tourism because Kashmir was doing well.”

The Dalai Lama arrived in the early 1960s, but McLeodganj didn’t begin to bustle until the 1980s when troubles hit Kashmir and halted the flow of tourism there.

Tourists now come from all over, some to study Buddhism, others to do trekking in the mountains, still others to soak up the vibes of a place with a distinct Tibetan air.

“The place is on the international map,” Nowrojee said.

 Many of the young people come from one country in particular.

“The present influx is more of Israelis,” Nowrojee told me, “lots and lots of Israelis. They don’t learn Buddhism, but they just found the place a haven for themselves. In fact, there’s a joke going around town that it’s time they had a rabbi there are so many of them.”

At one point, McLeodganj became known as “Little Lhasa” because of the number of Tibetans living here.

“We Indians got up and said, ‘You better not do that because we don’t want it to become a Lhasa only. This land belongs to us,’” Nowrojee said.

Another longtime resident here, Phil Void, an American Buddhism expert with a long gray-flecked beard, remembered how much the settlement has changed.

“There were no taxi cabs then,” he recalled. “The road between the temple and the library was a goat path.”

Monkeys roam the town. Yesterday afternoon, I was walking up the road from the temple, and a large monkey barreled down from a pine tree and crossed the road, setting two dogs to howling. I looked around and saw a dead baby monkey on the side of the road. Apparently, the dogs had killed the baby, angering the mother.

Today, many thousand Tibetan exiles live in this settlement, but not all of them really feel settled, as it were.

One with whom I spent a bit of time is Tenzin Losel. Like many Tibetans, he hopes the region isn’t his permanent home. He wants to go home to Tibet.

“I just feel like I’m a passenger at the station. The train can leave at any time. I never feel settled,” Losel told me.

We're in India right now and on Sunday night we went to a Delhi train station to catch an overnight train to Dharamsala, a hill station in the north. On hindsight, I don’t know if it was the main station. I just recall it being labeled the Old Delhi station.

It was a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Hundreds of people were sleeping on the platforms, some huddled on dirty old blankets. That much was to be expected. What caught us by surprise was the brutality with which policemen patrolling the platform suddenly used on a couple of poor people.

I couldn’t understand a word as they shouted in Hindi. One civilian appeared to be accusing the two of something. The policemen would occasionally punch and slap the head of the so-called miscreants. One had a cane and started beating the legs of one of the victims. In self-defense, he grabbed the cane and threw it on to the tracks.

That drew our attention to the tracks. They were alive with big fat rats. There were at least a dozen running along – a few feet below the people sleeping on the platform.

The train itself looked so grungy my wife would only get on at my urging. It was dimly lit and a poor cousin to the soft sleepers of China. What was most surprising was how passengers who boarded chained up their briefcases and suitcases to special clamps to deter the robbers who apparently roam the trains. We slept atop our respective suitcases. The Sikh who was on an adjacent bunk tried to hearten us, saying he didn’t think it so likely that we’d be targeted by robbers.

We arrived in Dharamsala, which sits more than 5,000 feet in the Himalayan foothills, and is surrounded by lovely pine forests. It’s a peaceful place, with clean air and without the dust of New Delhi.

I discovered one drawback – dogs – that made me think of a recent visit I had to a physician in Beijing who urged me to get a rabies vaccination for China. I dismissed the notion. As I was walking back to the hotel last night, three large dogs started snapping at me and lunging at my legs. I swung my camera bag and hit one on the snout. Luckily, the dogs stayed back as I inched backward up a hill to a gate to the hotel.

A local newsletter I read this morning had the headline: Beware of Rabies in Dharamsala Region. It noted that there were four reported rabies deaths in this region in the first two weeks of October. It also said a person dies of rabies every half hour in India, with a toll of over 30,000 fatalities a year.

Rabies may exist in rural China but I don’t think it’s as rampant as in India.

Our older daughter is in the last hours of picking which universities to apply to for next year’s admissions.

Last night, we went through the list of eight colleges and universities, as we have been doing regularly for several months. Among them are two in Canada, one being the University of Toronto.

I reached over and picked up the Princeton Review’s List of 366 best colleges and universities, which has been like a Bible around our house, and immediately saw the number of students at Toronto: nearly 60,000.

“Why would you want to go to a university with 60,000 students?” I asked.

To which she promptly replied something like, “Well, it’s on Jiao Tong University’s list of best universities in the world.”

Say what? You’re going to take Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s word on where the best places for you to go to school are?

I had vaguely heard that the Shanghai university made an annual list of the best research university’s in the world but didn’t pay it much heed. After all, those kinds of lists often strike me as arbitrary.

I got up this morning still thinking about the matter. After Googling the list, I quickly found that places like the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Minnesota proudly note that they are fairly high on Jiao Tong’s list.

Wikipedia says that Jiao Tong makes its list using “a formula that took into account alumni winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (10 percent), staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals (20 percent), ‘highly-cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories’ (20 percent), articles published in Nature and Science (20 percent), the Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (20 percent) and the per capita academic performance (on the indicators above) of an institution (10 percent).

So it seems that they are using standardized criteria.

Here’s an article that says there are only two global rankings that index universities, the other being The Times Higher Education Supplement, which apparently is more holistic and takes into consideration fellow academics’ opinions of any given university.

The equivalent in the United States might be the annual US News & World Report ratings, although I haven’t seen them in many years.

In this part of the world, though, the Jiao Tong list is taken increasingly seriously.

If our eyes and ears are any indication, the global downturn is also affecting China.

From the always humorous Access Asia newsletter come five recession anecdotes heard in the past week:

1) The overstuffed China conferences sector is taking a hit as, despite reduced prices, 'early bird' discounts and two for ones, getting people to shell out for conferences is getting harder;
2) Among the retailers, footwear stores seem to be taking the hardest hit as people decide to make that pair of shoes last a bit longer than they did last year, or simply go barefoot;
3) Record number of bars offering free food if you keep drinking - promotions offering us basically a free dinner of nibbles if we keep buying the high margin booze are omnipresent now;
4) Freelance journalists are finding work harder to come by and word rates are cut as magazines lose advertising and subsequently cut back their word counts on editorial;
5) Fakes are back in abundance on China's streets as struggling factories turn to piracy to keep the machines running as the orders fall away.

Access Asia also suggests that bankrupt factory owners avoid high priced lawyers and follow this simple advice:

1) Switch off the lights;
2) Lock factory gates behind you;
3) Run;
4) Eeerrr, keep on running.

There is no doubt that relations between China and India have improved markedly. Trade is up. Premier Wen Jiabao and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seem to have a warm relationship.

But mistrust lingers among the onetime rivals, and it shows up in unusual places.

In recent days, the mistrust has surged amid a change of government in The Maldives, a luxury tourist destination of 1,190 islands (that's it above, get your bathing suit on). The islands sit in a strategic location amid sea lanes going from the Middle East to Asia.

A change of government is unusual enough in the Maldives. Outgoing President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom (repeat that 20 times!) ruled the Maldives for three decades. The new leader is a former political prisoner.

If Indian news reports are any indication, the change of government has been a wake-up call for India about China’s inroads in the Maldives.

One of India’s chief wire services, the Indo-Asian News Service, carried a story Monday with the following paragraph:

“Some Maldives watchers in India have expressed concerns at China’s efforts to scale up its economic and strategic presence in the Maldives that may pose a threat to India’s interests. They cite China’s funding of many development projects in the Maldives and allude to reports about China entering into a deal to build a naval base in one of the Maldives islands.”

China, for one, helped build a new foreign ministry for the Maldives following the devastation of the 2004 Asian tsunami that left more than 200,000 people dead.

India’s vice president, Hamid Ansari, was peppered with questions by Indian journalists as he arrived in the Maldivian capital, Male, for the inauguration of the new leader, Mohamed Nasheed (seen above).

According to the Press Trust of India, another major wire service, Ansari said: “I do not know how credible those reports are. The President-elect (Nasheed) was in India some time back and he himself doubted those reports."

China’s ties to the Maldives are not new. Records from the Ming Dynasty show Chinese mariners arrived in the Maldives in the 15th Century.

Chinese tourism to the Maldives is rising rapidly. Last year, 35,000 tourists went.

All of us in this part of the world certainly know about the Maldives, with their catchy television jingle about the “Sunny side of Life.”

Even if China were looking to set up a base in the Maldives, it may not be there long. On coming to office this week, Nasheed proposed buying land abroad in case sea levels rise and swamp the island nation. He wants to relocate the entire country.

Some latent public anger against police is bubbling up in China.

The latest incident occurred last Friday in Shenzhen, and the repercussions still are rippling.

According to both Chinese and foreign news accounts, motorcyclist Li Guochao was killed on Friday after a fled a checkpoint. Li was driving an unlicensed cycle. One of the employees at the checkpoint – apparently not a police officer but a civilian municipal worker – tossed a walkie talkie at him as he sped away.

The walkie talkie hit Li in the head, and he promptly ran into a telephone pole, dying hours later in the hospital.

According to news wire accounts here and here, hundreds of people gathered outside a police station and threw rocks. Someone set a police car ablaze. Thousands looked on.

The police later offered Li’s family a cash payment of about $29,000 to resolve the matter, according to state media.

This incident follows another on July 1 in which a 28-year-old accused bicycle thief went into a Shanghai police precinct on a stabbing spree, killing six officers and wounding four others. The man, Yang Jia, later became a bit of an internet sensation when some citizens suggested his rage at police may have been understandable.

Yang had been picked up over the alleged theft of a bicycle last year, and one report said police beat him.

When Yang appealed his death sentence three weeks ago, supporters showed up outside the courthouse wearing T-shirts with his likeness. Police dispersed them. Yang’s death sentence was upheld.

But there is also a case that may uphold the opposite view – that the public sympathizes with police when powerful people try to get away with bad behavior or even crime.

In a case last month, six police officers beat to death Lin Songling outside a bar in Harbin in northeastern China. At first, it seemed like a possible case of police abuse. But later reports suggested Lin had repeatedly hit police first, including throwing a concrete block at one, saying he was well-connected to party officials in Harbin. This story says two officers may yet be charged in the death. But in the court of public opinion, the verdict was mixed. Maybe Lin wasn’t so well-connected, and maybe police did overstep their authority.

Courtesy of Access Asia, here’s are a couple of global crisis jokes:

Question: What's the difference between an investment banker and a pizza?

Answer: A pizza can feed a family of four.

And

Question: What is the capital of Iceland?

Answer: About £3.50

More humor over the transom from the Asia Foundation’s e-newsletter, which notes that Indonesians are over the moon with Barack Obama’s election triumph in the United States, mainly because Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, where his mother was a research social scientist.

The joke goes: “Obama was able to win against all odds after only spending four years in Indonesia  –  imagine what he could have done if he had spent his whole life here.”

On a more serious note, I spent much of the day after the U.S. election on the phone calling around the region for reaction (here’s our story). I looked on the internet for where people might be gathering to watch U.S. election results. One place was the Mustang Saloon & Grill in Auckland, New Zealand. So I called.

A Californian named Troy Barsten (from Sacramento) got on the line first, then he handed the phone over to Calum McKenzie, a Kiwi who helps write dining guides in New Zealand and Australia. One of the things McKenzie said about Obama’s election grabbed my attention: “The Maoris and the Pacific Islanders are going to take inspiration from him.”

I also phoned the Flying Pan restaurant in Hong Kong where TVs were tuned to the election, and got Mark Tjhung, an Australian, on the phone. He’s a 27-year-old writer for TimeOut, the listings magazine.

“It’s a fantastic moment for the world to see how a country with widely known racial issues has progressed this far,” Tjhung said, adding that the racial element would probably have wide impact.

So my own question is: How much will minority groups feel empowered by Obama’s victory, and how might it change their behavior?

The state-controlled media in China carefully measures its words when weighing how to portray events abroad.

Sometimes newspapers jump the gun.

Early on Thursday, the China Daily newspaper website carried a commentary that began:
“Like American people on the other side of the Pacific, we are elated, too, at the landslide win of Democrat Barack Obama . . .”

Elated? That’s a pretty strong word for a country that routinely lashes out at anyone that dares meddle in the “internal affairs” of China.

Well, it must have been a mistake. Within hours, the website commentary had been changed to read that “we are excited. . .”

Wait a few hours. Maybe it’ll read “we are content.”