This is Halloween!

Oh man, do I love this holiday. My week was fairly uneventful as the majority of it was spent preparing for the joys of the weekend to come. Others share this sentiment as well. When we were chatting about our past weeks, no one really had anything to say. So, I won't bore you with the minute details of my days. Friday was my last day until after the holidays of demonstrating the Astronomy labs. It was a super fun group of students this year. They were enthusiastic and optimistic, particularly when stuff would go horribly wrong. Anyway, so I said farewell to them and now I have a giant stack of lab books to grade. We'll see how they did.

One of my friends is finishing up her PhD dissertation and is, understandably, a bit stressed out. She hasn't been out with anyone in ages and doesn't even come to coffee any more. So we decided to go out for a girl's science fiction night. The original plan was to dress up like science fiction babes and hit the town. But since we had all been pretty stressed, and poor, we decided to have a quiet night in at one of our flats. Two of us still insisted on dressing up though; me because I lost a ton of weight to fit into my costume and the other because she wanted to wear the Star Trek uniform I have. We ordered the usual curry from the usual restaurant and sure had a laugh when I had to answer the door in my costume to give him the money. Anyway, we drank some leftover bottles of wine from the flatwarming party the week before and hunkered down for some much needed chat. We ended up watching Love Actually later on in the evening, which was a lot of fun because I hadn't seen it in at least 4 years. At least. Thankfully, my diet was over, so I inhaled my Chicken Tikka Garam Masala and Naan. Inhaled it.

The next day, it was Halloween; one of my favourite holidays. I stayed in my pyjamas all day, sluggish from the curry baby in my stomach. I watched all the old Halloween classics: Nightmare Before Christmas, Hocus Pocus and Rocky Horror while I worked on my Halloween costume. The theme of the party was "dead celebrities" so I was going as Jackie Kennedy Onassis, obviously, being my sexy, classy, stylish, American self. So my big project of the day was constructing a pillbox hat from an old charity shop hat I had bought. Surprisingly, it was super difficult to find sunglasses in Scotland, so I settled for an old pair of mine. My friend came over, dressed as Farrah Fawcett, to help me with my hair before the party. I have a LOT of hair, so it was pretty difficult to rat up, but I finally managed what I could and we headed out.

I had heard that Halloween was sort of a big deal in Glasgow, particularly in comparison to the rest of the UK, where it passes almost unnoticed, but nothing prepared me for stepping out of my flat at 8pm and seeing almost every person, of all ages, dressed in costume wandering the streets. Trick-or-treating obviously isn't that big of a deal in a big city with sketchy flats and even sketchier (is that a word?) people, but everyone was dressed up, going to pubs or parties. And I mean everyone was dressed up. It was excellent. So we walked the 10 minutes to the flat where the party was, me fine in my wool, 70's coat and my friend freezing in her swimsuit and tights.

We arrived to the party to find Charlie Chaplin already drinking, Keith Floyd (a famous British TV chef who just died) drinking his signature wine, Natalie Wood taping fishes to her shirt and Chairman Mao struggling with taping Chinese Flags to his uniform. More and more people arrived and everyone put in tons of effort. There were Che Guevara, Audrey Hepburn, Marie Antoinette, and so many other great costumes. Even one chap did a last minute Scotty (the deceased Star Trek actor) uniform and discovered that his camera case looked conspicuously like a Star Trek communicator and had to spend the rest of the evening convincing people that he really wasn't that into Star Trek to put together such an accurate costume. Even my friend with a giant, red beard that is actually his, came as a disturbingly convincing young Sir Alec Guinness (dressed as Obi-Wan of course).

All was fine and well until Karl Marx started making pints of white russians, which promptly put me to sleep on the couch, along with Freddie Mercury and Linda McCartney. I finally woke up, with nothing drawn on me, thankfully and walked home with a few girls. We left at about 1:30am and you still couldn't believe how many people were in costume on the streets partying.

This was the first Halloween party that I didn't have to organize and definitely the only one where everyone put in at least SOME effort. It was a fantastic time and everyone really seemed to enjoy themselves. For those of you on facebook, photos are up...so enjoy!

The next day, I finally suffered the never-ending, day-long hangover. I stayed in bed all day, watched half of the first season of the West Wing and a few films, eating nothing. Absolutely worth it though.

Sorry for the short post...see you next week!