A Spooky Saturday

Living in Korea for the last nine months has meant learning to put my American habits and customs on the backburner and open my mind to the traditions rooted in the East. I’ve been fairly good at this so far. I happily embraced Buddha’s birthday, teacher’s day, Chuseok, and numerous other Korean national holidays. In light of doing this I watched St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, and Labor Day slip by unnoticed. However, when it came to Halloween I put my foot down. I refused to shrug my shoulders and accept a lack of Halloween as a possibility. Luckily, my friends felt the same way.

For the week leading up to Halloween, we all wandered the Emarts and Homeplus’s of Gwangju to find a way to turn ordinary items into a costume. After scouring what these places had to offer, I settled on Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. While I don’t fully understand it, headbands with ears and other bedazzlements are very popular with Koreans, and I was able to find a headband with red antlers as well as a red clown nose. To pull my look together I bought a set of brown thermals. Thus Rudolph was born. Eric got lucky and found an inexpensive pirate kit at Emart.

On Saturday night we hosted our friends at our apartment for a make shift Halloween party. In our tiny studio apartment, we managed to squeeze in Spiderman, a monkey, a vampire, a cat burglar, a pirate, a woman, and masquerade ball-goer. We kept the festivities going with dim lighting, which was the result of our light bulb blowing out, but I think it gave our soiree the spook factor it needed. Although I’m pretty sure we looked like a bunch of freaks drinking in the dark!

After spending an ample amount of time at our place, we decided to take our festivities downtown. We heard through the grapevine that the Western bar, Speakeasy, would be hosting a Halloween bash. So we piled into cabs and walked through the busy streets of downtown in our costumes. Now if I thought we got stared at before, we were definitely gawked and pointed at from the moment we left our apartment until we made it to the bar. However, it was all worth it. We ended up surrounded by Westerners and Koreans alike who are fond of the holiday. What made the evening more memorable was seeing what costumes people created from everyday items. Overall, Halloween turned out as it always does; filled with candy, costumes, cocktails…no complaints here!