Halloween is my favourite party holiday. As a girl, it's the one time of year you are allowed to leave your morals with wild abandon, wear the craziest/sexiest thing you can muster and not a soul will judge you.
The greatest part of the fun is deciding what to wear. This time last year my friends and I spent a month planning and preparing for Halloween. There's a fine line between sexy and trashy and it's important for a girl to not only know where that line is, but walk on it.
Seeing other people's creativity is quite a kick too. Just on Facebook I saw a friend as "the cool guy from youtube" wearing a massive cardboard youtube frame around himself.
But in Spain, it's not such a big deal. You'd barely know it was even a thing if we didn't all have a holiday on the 1st November. It seemed to be a very niche market with only a few people dressing up.
Oh, but when they do, they were very scary! Which is what I guess Halloween should be about.I saw plenty of ghouls and grungy emo angels. I suspect that for some, this is also the one time of year they can actually wear what they like, in a city that's probably 98% Catholic (don't quote me) and would find Halloween a little too pagan, I think some people would find it hard to be accepted if they wore the punk grunge look daily. This ain't no Camden.
The first Halloween was a costume birthday party, and only having decided on the morning that I would go, I had only a few hours to hash together some sort of costume.
I ended up as a Native American. Think chick from Night at the Museum rather than Pocahontas.
The second Halloween started off as a few beers after work, me donning my home-made cat ears which I had worn all day in school and a black dress. Other teachers had also worn witches hats and face paint. Halloween with the students is always fun, playing games where they have to "trick or treat" for candy. It's a nice break from the daily grind of textbooks and some guy in some country doing some thing that they don't care about.
As is tradition of human beings when they don't have to work the next day (woop Spain!) we ended up staying out late and went to the ever popular irish pub, O'Donaghue's.
If I had ever thought that Córdoba had just forgotten Halloween, walking through the door of this pub was like going though a wormhole to a different dimension.
The whole place was covered in beautiful spiders webs hanging from zombies, skeletons, mummys, vampires, monsters, and other delightfully ugly decorations.
It was obvious that a lot of time and effort had gone in to decorating the place and for a homesick halloween kitty, it was definitely appreciated.
Going there with a few teachers from my school and their other halves, it was nice to meet some other Spanish people. I really hope that my Spanish will improve over the next month to the point where I can have a conversation. I was glad I made the decision to go out and not chicken out home which is what I almost did!
The drinks at O'Donaghue's were massive!!! It took us girls a long time to finish one drink, but mysteriously, the ice didn't melt! Culture tip #17 they put a lot of alcohol in their mixed drinks! I was prefectly happy sipping on my mammoth wine glass of vodka lemonade for the rest of the night.
The night was perfect for me. It wasn't crazy, we had a good group in a place with amazing atmosphere. The music could've probably been better but it was hardly noticeable.
The next holiday now will be my favouritest of them all: Christmas!!!
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