BOO! Halloween Time

We enjoyed our first Halloween in China last night. Vizcaya, our compound, had trick-or-treating for the kids. Then we headed to the Miller's for a Halloween party. So it was a full night of candy and fun. Believe it or not, it was actually pretty easy to get some basic Halloween decorations and a costume for me. Carrefour does have it's value. So you can see from the picture that

Lauren and Jamie Miller came to Vizcaya around 4:30 (they are the beautiful vampires in the picture). We headed to the clubhouse around 4:45. The Miller's arrived dressed as vampires, and I was a vampire as well. So, we were a scary vampire family with a cute princess daughter! Tom stayed and took the job of handing out the candy, tough life! By the way, for those of you who are familiar with Natalie's trick or treating experiences in the past, you are probably wondering how excited she really was. Well, having some friends go with her that were older helped a bunch. But I still caught a bit of hesitation on her face a few times. Overall though she did great! When the trick or treating started at 5pm, there were about 150-200 kids streaming from the clubhouse down to the first street of villas. Needless to say, that first house got quite a hit of kids all at once. In fact, the whole street was a steady stream of kids. After about 15 minutes though, things spread out a bit.

So you are probably wondering what kinds of candy we had here. The girls all raked in quite a bit, an interesting mix of Chinese crackers to a single Reese's cup. Some families had brought a lot of candy back from the states for just this reason. Makes you a bit homesick to see real Tootsie rolls and Twizzlers! But you know, kids are kids, and I think they were all pretty pleased with the "take". The gummy Eyeballs were the favorite treat of the night. I would show you a picture, but they ate them all! But, I think the picture of Jamie to the left shows what happens after about 5 of them! After hitting about half of the houses here in an hour, we headed up to the clubhouse for haunted houses and pumpkins. One funny thing that happened was that the bartenders were making drinks with sprite and dry ice. The kids thought they were great. Natalie finished her Sprite and then said "This ice is REALLY cold!". Geesh, I told them then not to swallow it. How dangerous!! I wonder how many kids drank some of that ice last night? Anyway, turned out that we did not have pumpkins to carve, so we went ahead and walked back to the house.




And headed to the real party. The Miller's celebrate big at Halloween as they were married close the holiday. It was a great evening with good friends, good food, and fun games. Lots of good things to eat, good friends, and many laughs.


In the picture to the left, you can see Cave woman (Kathy), Ms. Cell Phone (Ceyda), and Ms. Pirate (Angie) checking out the good food. Ceyda's kept coming up and telling us "hit 555-8888", it's hits all my favorite areas!". Ceyda! You can't take her anywhere... Everyone had really good costumes (except for Tom, see below). And that is quite the accomplishment in China!



We got a good picture of the men: Caveman (Brian), Viking (Heinrick), Tom (oh, he went as himself), Matador (Haken), and the "Best Dressed Man Here" (Michael). Wasn't Tom clever? Who knew his sense of humor went so deep?


The kids really had a good time. Lots of fun games and everyone won something (good job Kathy!). Grace the bunny looks like she is having a good time. Natalie and Jamie won the "Make a Mummy" contest (sorry, I probably helped her too much!). They also had a fun game with string, counting peanuts and candy corn, and a fun word game. Natalie was beat by the time the evening wore down. We had brought her pj's and so she ended up staying the night for her first sleep over with Jamie and Lauren. She did really great too! She said she got to have pancakes in the morning for breakfast. We are so proud of her for not being afraid. Now she is asking for sleepovers every night!

The Miller's had a copy of Rocky Horror Picture Show and so we stuck it in the DVD player, but the put sound down. Of course all the kids were drawn like flies to honey! The picture here is of the scene where Brad is floating in the glass fish tank. What we let our children do when we are entertaining ourselves!



At the end of the evening, I was gathering up our belongings, and I found Brian (see picture) in the entryway. I swear that there was no staging involved with this photo. Now, there might have been quite a few drinks before this particular shot, though I doubt that Brian would EVER drink more than 2 or 3 in an evening!
There are three choices for the real action behind this picture:

1. His caveman costume was not actually a costume, but his normal day-to-day GM uniform
2. His love of the Chinese toilet goes way beyond normal admiration
3. He is showing us how REAL Chinese wait on the corners with their bread