Halloween!

Happy belated Halloween, everyone. This year Kane and I dressed up with a Shaun of the Dead theme - perhaps our collective favorite movie ever - whereby Kane wielded a blood caked cricket bat (wickets included for only $15 - thank you Big W!) and I was a zombie. I was going to be Liz, but I don't have the hair, and I would have just looked like a normal person. So, zombie it was.

I turned out to be a good zombie; my pale skin, unruly hair, and vacant looks (unrelated to the hair) turned out to be good for something. I spent a while getting the makeup just right, I think it turned out rather nicely. That is to say, a drunk girl came up to me at the party we attended and said, "you look really...bad...like, dead!", which I took as a compliment. Though it's hard to respond to that, "yeah, you look...bad...too, but bad like good, uh, like bad-ass...or something". Cue awkward sips of our respective drinks and then feigning interest in adjacent conversations. See? Social excellence even as a zombie.

Just to be clear, they do not have Halloween, per se, in this country. That is to say that everyone is completely aware of just about everything about it, like they are about most American traditions, but no one dresses up, has parties, or trick or treats. And they're lucky that the kids don't know what they're missing, or they'd have quite a situation on their hands. Life without Halloween, what a sad fate. However, we American Expats refuse to be silenced and are compelled by a patriotic duty to express the traditions of our homeland while abroad. Hence the Halloween party for American rejects.

It was a good party: well decorated - if not quite as well attended - with appropriate Halloween party food featuring chips, cookies, candy, pumpkin-pie flavored jello shots (no idea how she did that), well-spiked punch, and a variety of BYO beverages. The company was good and it adequately fulfilled our Halloween hankerings. And the hosts had three dogs and four cats for me to ogle over, what more could I ask?

One of the funnier things about Halloween in Melbourne is that it falls on the weekend before the Melbourne Cup: a huge horse race that has somehow managed to achieve a paid holiday for every working class person in this entire city. And pretty much only this city - it's not a holiday anywhere else in the country. So, while there are a small amount of vampires, flappers, and hill-billies roaming the streets on Halloween, they are oddly juxtaposed with groups of folks dressed in their finest attire. It's hard to tell who's in a costume and who's not sometimes. Except the zombies, they're pretty obvious. My boss actually said that traffic was stopped on the bridge on his way to work on Friday due to an unruly vampire that decided to walk down the middle of the road. I thought that was especially funny since they don't celebrate Halloween; apparently one ballsy guy was doing the celebrating for all of them.

So that's Halloween in Melbourne. See more of our pictures on my Picasa site: Alana was Punky Brewster and Marc was (pretty obviously) someone from Alien. Enjoy.