HALLOWEEN (a la Korea)

What happened to our school??

Who haunted these hallways? hehe, me!

Korea does not celebrate Halloween, but they do recognize that it is a Western holiday. A few Halloween decorations and a limited amount of costume supplies are stocked in the local "everything" store in order to cater to the foreign English teachers who have to teach their students about Halloween. But other than that, Koreans don't decorate their houses, don't dress up in costume, and don't do trick-or-treating.

Shyla, the amazing spider!

Teachers in Costume, Watch Out!

a Mum-a-mum-a-mummayy

All wrapped up, what to do?

Kids posing during Mummy Relay

Too cute!!

Schools here almost always do some sort of Halloween celebration for the kids to teach them about this very Western holiday. That included the school I work at too, and we went all out! We decorated the hallways of the 6th floor to a festive and spooky sight. We transformed each classroom so that we could host a variety of activities for the students. There was a "Pin-the-Face-on-the-Jack-o-Lantern" game, a scary story room, a Mummy Relay game, and a craft room where they could make masks. We had a short Halloween movie for them to watch, and a photo room where they could dress up in various costumes we provided and get their picture taken. And we had a "Gross Room", where the kids stuck their hands in black boxes and had to describe what they felt (we said mashed bananas were brains, peeled grapes were eyeballs, noodles were worms, sticks were spider legs, frozen hand, zombie hair, etc). And all of us teachers had to dress up! A coworker, Shyla, had a great spider costume she made, which was so perfect since she was in charge of the gross room....the kids loved it! Some of my Korean co-teachers were cats, witches, pirates....and Laura, Jacquie, and I were Sailor Scouts from the Sailor Moon cartoon anime we grew up with. I ran the Mummy Relay room, which is where the kids get a roll of toilet paper and try to wrap up someone on their team like a mummy. Best mummy wins candy, or course. It was great to see the kids having so much fun, and they were hilarious! We tried to get some good action shots of them :)

I love it!

And the best part...throwing it around!

Can't mess with these girls!

Sailor Venus pose, what what!

Sailor Venus, Sailor Jupiter & Sailor Mercury

Now, back to our costumes. All of us girls liked the Sailor Moon show when growing up, and since we are in Asia for Halloween and all together for the school Halloween activities, we thought it would be fun to dress up together. It worked perfectly for the 3 of us too. Laura was Sailor Jupiter because she has longer brown hair, Jacquie was Sailor Mercury because she has short brown hair, and I was Sailor Venus because I have the long blonde hair. But in order to make this vision happen, we had to physically make the costumes. So we went to the market and sifted through the random fabric till we found the right colors for our bows. We found an amazingly bright orange dress in one of the clothes piles at the market, which suited for the orange skirt I needed. And then we got ribbon and other necessities for all of our accessories. We glued, sewed, and tied together everything ourselves and, considering that, they didn't turn out too bad if we do say so ourselves :) Some of the kids thought I was trying to be Wonder Woman, but a good enough amount of them could tell we were Sailor Scouts, so that's a win in my book :)  Technically, for those fans out there, we were missing 2 other scouts in our sailor-posse, but oh well we just told people that Sailor Mars and Sailor Moon were out fighting villains. The kids might think we're a little crazy now, hehe!

Bye bye for now!