Happy thanksgiving to all our American readers! It’s been a week of food posts for Topics of the World, and to finish off here is an American food blog, just in time for Thanksgiving.

Pinch my Salt author Nicole has been preparing for thanksgiving with a series of holiday recipes. Creamy mashed potatoes, curried chicken salad and pumpkin spice cake are just some of the mouth-watering dishes.

Of course there are many more recipes and they all look very good. Nicole got her inspiration to cook from time she spent living in Sicily and the odd Sicilian recipe sneaks in there too.

For the rest us who are not celebrating Thanksgiving but would like to know more about it, History.com explains all about Thanksgiving history and traditions.

Arabic coffee is strong, dark and sipped from tiny cups. It is drunk in most Arabic countries (although in North Africa tea is also very popular). Whereas in some countries it may be drunk plain and sweet, in Kuwait it is flavoured with cardamom and should never be drunk with sugar.

Each Arabic country has its own rituals concerning coffee and this descriptive article from The Kuwait Times writes about the Kuwaiti traditions of drinking Arabic coffee.

Maybe the most important tradition to know about as a visitor to Kuwait is that finishing your cup and handing it back to your host means that it will always be refilled. To show that you don’t want more you should shake the cup before giving it back. Useful to know if you want to be able to sleep!

Traditionally the Japanese diet is rich in foods like rice, fish, vegetables and seaweed and is considered to be one of the more healthy diets of the world. However in recent years this has changed. Nowadays Japanese people eat more meat and fat, like in many other developed nations.

This worries the government and so the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has commissioned a groovy animated video to educate people about the problem.

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When I wrote to Burcu of Almost Turkish Recipes about this post, she replied saying that a post about yogurt in Turkish culture would have to be very long! Well, here is the short version, but there is further reading for anyone who makes it to the end still wanting more.

Yogurt is thought to originate from Central Asia, the heart of the ancient silk road. It was probably discovered as a way to preserve milk, especially in the furnace-like summers of the Uzbekistan desert. The bacteria in yogurt mean that it can last much longer than fresh milk.

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The use of beads in Africa can be traced back at least 12,000 years. The oldest known beads have been found in the Kalahari desert, Sudan and Libya. The earliest beads were made of eggshell, clay, twigs, stones, ivory and bone - glass beads were introduced later by traders from Europe, India and the Middle East.

Beads were used in various parts of Africa as adornment or works of art. In some African economies they also served as currency. As adornment they were important in defining and identifying someone’s status, as well as what tribe or group they belonged to.

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Tata’s long awaited Nano, the small car which will bring car ownership within reach of thousands of Indian families, may transform the profile of the auto industry. While car manufacturers in other countries cut forecasts, this low cost car is predicted to increase Indian car sales by 20%.

There has been much debate about the environmental effects of many new car owners in fast growing countries such as India and China.

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A recent study on prejudice has made important findings - that racial tolerance and trust can spread within communities as fast as suspicion.

Researchers in the USA created a programme which works to quickly build a strong bond between two people from diverse racial groups, including black, white, Asian and Latino.

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Obama’s historic win in the USA elections is dominating the news this week so we couldn’t ignore it, even though politics is not normally part of what we are trying to do at PocketCultures.

The outcome of this election will have an impact on the lives of people all over the world, not just in the USA, and many news sources have written articles on reactions of different countries to the result.

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It has been speculated that one of the reasons for the abundance of Chinglish (Chinese-flavoured English) on public signs in China could be a lack of proof reading by someone with experience of the language.

It seems China is not the only place where this happens: the BBC writes about a bilingual road sign in Wales which ended up a victim of this phenomenon. This time, however, it was not just bad Welsh which ended up on the sign - it was the translator’s automatic email response saying he was out of the office.

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Modern day Mongolians may be steadily migrating towards the cities, following similar trends in developing countries around the world, but in the past they belonged in the Central Asian steppes and spent much time on horseback.

Traditional Mongolian clothing reflects this lifestyle. It is simple, practical, comfortable and uses materials like wool, silk, felt and sheepskin for keeping warm in winter. Discover Mongolia has this article about traditional Mongolian clothing.

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