It kind of goes without saying that Korea isn’t exactly into Halloween. To my surprise, there were some decorations and things in a few of the bigger stores. You could buy some small items, but costumes were few and far between. I did Halloween in Italy, so I was kind of prepared for that. Unlike in Siena, I was actually able to find a few things, so it wasn’t just a scavenger hunt through other peoples’ clothes.
I was a fairy. It wasn’t much of a costume, but it was enough for school. We celebrated Halloween at my school, and it was rather awesome. For the morning classes, we had the children do pumpkin piñatas, face painting, and scary stories. The best part was the “Ghost House.” They took my room for the Ghost house, and we put up black trash bags and made a labyrinth. Then they proceeded to scare the children mercilessly.
I did the face painting. It was kind of fun, even though I was really bad at first. One group of boys wanted Power Rangers (they were just stick figures when I did them) and that was rough. After that, I kind of pushed spiders and lightning bolts. I know the boy doesn’t look all that happy in the picture, but after the wicked lightning bolts I gave him he perked up.
For afternoon classes, we got to be in the Ghost House while our own classes went through. Not to worry those at home, but everyone enjoyed scaring the pants off our kids. Naturally, the most evil child in our school (who happens to be in one of my classes) took advantage of the dark to punch a teacher (not me). Other than that, though, it was really fun. My oldest class also reacted the most. Some of them actually refused to go further than the door. This contrasts sharply with the youngest student I had, who just wandered through the place, calm as you please.
I included a picture of most of the teachers at my school. We have a haggard bunch of costumes, but some of them are pretty cool. The creepiest one was the cowboy. The funniest was the guy dressed as a hiking Ajussi. On the weekends, the subways are inundated with hiking couples (Adjuma is an older woman, Ajussi is an older man) dragging huge backpacks and hundreds of dollars in equipment. People didn’t know that he was in costume (he has a flame handkerchief over his face in the picture), and strangers asked him where he was going to hike.
We went out on Saturday night. H was Waldo (Where’s Waldo), which I thought was a really inventive costume. It turns out there were about five other Waldos. It was kind of like the Where’s Waldo with a whole host of people in stripes and you have to find the true Waldo. Except, you know, only five. D was even cooler: She was Sandra Park from 2NE1, a Korean pop group. If you’re curious about her Frank Lloyd Wright hair and odd costume, check out the music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIRW_elc-rY We actually saw another girl in the same costume (a little more accurate, but with shorter hair). Koreans who saw her often sang a 2NE1 song at her. As a result, we tended to go down the street singing “Ey, ey, ey, ey, ey,ey, e-ey, 2NE1” (If you’re curious or bored, here’s a link to the song we were quoting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwq-XdPfpeA&feature=fvst ).
Oddly, we didn’t see any other fairies that night. For Saturday, I was a goth fairy. It wasn’t much of a change from my costume for school, but it sounded cooler. It served me well, and proves that your own costume is only secondary to seeing all the other costumes out there.
Naturally, we went to the two main foreigner neighborhoods for Halloween (Itaewon and Hongdae). Aside from meeting a Korean guy named Ham, it wasn’t really that different from the usual weekend. It rained, but we had a good time wandering around. I also learned that you have to be careful in pronouncing the word “kebob.” If you say “gebob,” (which is easy to do in Korea because they use the same symbol for those sounds), that means dog food. So you might wander around saying “I’m hungry! I could really go for some dog food!” Ham made fun of me, but a guy whose name is Ham doesn’t have much wiggle room in the mocking proteins department.
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