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Happy Halloween!


My apologies for the long, long time between blog posts. Since I last wrote, I took an amazing trip to Shanhaiguan, which is where the Great Wall terminates into the Yellow Sea. I’ve been writing and re-writing an account of the trip for the last month and…it’s not done yet. I’ve been picking and picking at it to get it to the point that I’m comfortable “publishing” it online, but it’s still a ways off from being something that I’m satisfied with. The trip was so fantastic and mind blowing that I want to do it justice, and just don’t feel like I’ve achieved that yet. (To tide you over you can check out all 200+ of my photos in the gallery.) To try to get through my writer’s block, here’s a little bit about the Halloween party that my office just hosted.

As I mentioned before, I work for an office that provides K-12 schools with English teachers. We also offer after-school/weekend English classes for students at our offices. We are opening a third branch of our office here in Changchun, and to celebrate we hosted a Halloween party there for all of our after-school students.

This was the first Halloween that any of the kids had ever experienced, and they took to it like fish to pH-balanced-and-temperature-controlled water. Even though costumes are terribly difficult to find here, most had masks to wear (typically mardi gras masks, but some had robot and monster masks…there were also more than a few Santa Claus masks), and a small number had home-made costumes. Finding something that I could wear to the party was a problem, and I had to scuttle my usual costume ideas (”Superman” and “Doctor”) because of difficulty finding costuming supplies. However, I was able to scrounge up a set of Groucho Marx glasses with nose and mustache attached, so I went as “A Guy In Slacks, A Tie, And Incongruous Groucho Marks Glasses.” The glasses were certainly better than having to resort to not dressing up and claiming to be wearing a “Normal Guy” costume.

There was an enormous turnout for the party. Counting both the kids and the parents, we easily had several hundred people there. Most kids came with both their parents, so the entire event felt like a nice family affair. We started the evening outside with the Foreign Teachers (pictured in their costumes: [L to R] Harry Potter, superhero, accident victim) telling the kids about the history of Halloween. After the fast “lesson”, the kids came inside the school to do various Halloween activities.


We had all the typical, fun Halloween stuff: a scare room, the guts game (peeled grapes as eye balls, noodles as brains, etc), pumpkin piñatas. We also had some things I wouldn’t have thought of, like pumpkin bowling. Pictured to the left is TA extrordinare Cindy trying to convince a girl dressed as a snake to put her hand in a nice bowl of brains…
There also were a few stations that were nothing more than giving the kids a chance to knock on a door, yell “Trick Or Treat!”, and get some candy. While the kids all really enjoyed getting candy, they seemed to like interacting with all the teachers the most.
The party ended with some dancing. Originally the teachers were going to dance to Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller”, but a combination of lack of rehearsal time and general difficulty of the dance kept that from happening. Instead, we danced with the kids to Thriller. The kids had a blast and the foreign teachers got mobbed.

So that was my Halloween. We had fun and, more importantly, all the kids had fun. Exporting Halloween to China was a success. If only it were this easy to export “democracy”…right President Bush?

As always, I hope everything is well with you and yours, and thanks for reading. You can check out all my photos from tonight in the gallery. And expect more updates soon…really!

Technorati Tags: Changchun, Halloween, Foreign Teachers, China