Halloween with the girls

My lovely friends from Tours came to visit me for the Halloween long weekend (well, I had a long weekend, I don't think they did in France because the 1st was a Saturday). I threw a small party in my apartment, we ate raclette, drank a lot of wine and some Jagermeister and Red Bull and the neighbours didn't complain. Success!

This was the first year I really made an effort with a costume, and even so, it wasn't super elaborate. Jules went all out, however! We actually got the idea for his costume back when I first moved to Brussels and purchased a red rubber oven mitt from IKEA that kind of looks like a claw. He thought it looked like the claw of a certain someone and I set myself the challenge of working out a costume that sort of matched. Can you guess who we were???

Excited to see my friends coming up the stairs

Elaborate cobweb decorations in the background

Is that a fish in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

The rest of the weekend was fairly quiet. On Saturday, we just mosied about the city centre seeing what there is to see (Mannekin Pis, the Grand Place etc.) and had dinner at a pretty average place in Sainte-Catherine. Jules, Mel and I headed back to bed like good boys and girls, but Caro and Liz stayed out partying to the wee hours (oh, how I have changed that I wasn't with them - although I probably would have stayed up longer the night before if people had let me) and were subsequently "indisposed" the next day.

The girls in Grande Place

Cheers! (It looks like I'm drinking milk but it was one of those fancy hot chocolates where you stir it in. It wasn't great)

Having a post-dinner rum in Place Sainte-Catherine

Although, again, we were lucky with the weather, it was a bit cold on the Sunday and I confess I was a bit jealous when we headed out leaving the girls to order pizza and watch a movie snuggled up on the coach. Mel, Jules and I had a lovely morning though, with champagne and fishy delights at Nordzee followed by a hot chocolate AND dessert at Frederic Blondeel. Spoiled!

Mel and I tuck into champagne and fish soup at Nordzee

Brussels traffic (there's always traffic, even on a Sunday) almost made the girls miss their train, but they got out of the car and ran for it and made it home after way too short a trip. We've got to start planning the next one!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween everyone! Before getting on to my evening, I have to give a shout-out to my Dad. It's long been a family tradition to make fun of him for his tales of turnip carving as a lad in semi-rural northwest England, but this year he finally ponied up and showed us all how it's done. After finding out first-hand how much effort goes into carving a pumpkin, I'm extra impressed by his turnip lantern:

And by the size of that thing, Baldrick would be beside himself

Moving on, I don't have that much to say about our Halloween festivities, except it was a lot of fun! Started off with drinks at Liz's (who made a huge effort with decorations, spooky food etc.) and then hopped our way around three different bars until 5 in the morning, when we headed home in the pouring rain. Feeling surprisingly decent this morning, especially considering the horrible straight tequila shot (not even with salt and lemon!) Max bought us.

Luckily my evil Frenchman costume was well-received by the natives!

A lot of them said, however, that they wouldn't have known what I was dressed at if I wasn't carrying a baguette around. The baguette cracked under the pressure of being under my arm all night, but luckily one of my friends came as MacGyver and duct-taped it up for me. How MacGyver is that?? And then I was explaining this to a 21 year-old Irish boy, and he didn't know who MacGyver was. Give me strength...

Me and Charlie and our spooky Halloween eyeball kirs

Liz, dressed in random spooky style, me and Charlie, who came as zombie Marie Antoinette

I don't know who the girl on the left is. My friend Caroline on the right came as Medusa and was a bit pissed that no-one knew who she was. In fairness, it's not at all obvious! The makeup was great though!

Caroline and Max. She's been going on about how I have to meet these guys for ages, and then we finally catch up with them and I totally knew them already. Tours is a small place.

Me and Caroline and sexy Pierre. Sexy Pierre, if you're reading this, give me a sexy call, k?

Carving out a new experience

Autumn is definitely upon us, and the temperature has plunged this week. Still, we have blue skies and crisp weather for the moment, which is not a bad thing. The clocks went back today, which is a bad thing. It's already been getting dark quite early, so now it will be all short days and gloom for the foreseeable. On the bright side, once again, I headed to the local park to capture a few pictures of the autumn leaves:

Last night, on the other hand, I had an entirely new autumn experience: pumpkin carving! I expected I would be terrible at this, since I have pretty much zero artistic ability and my knife skills are poor at best (and not enhanced by drinking wine). So on balance I think I did a pretty good job. I was pretty terrified of the bold stabs with a butcher knife you had to do to get into the top of the thing:

You can imagine the Psycho music here

And surprised at how much scraping and pulling out of gooey handfuls of flesh and seeds that had to be undertaken once you did get the top off. It's hard work!

It was a lot of fun though! I did a double-sided design, a pretty basic scary face on one side (and I managed to screw that up even) and hearts and stars on the back. It made a nice change from going out on the booze for once!

Marcia, Laura, Margot, me, Mathilde, Caroline and our pumpkins

The back of my pumpkin. The other ladies took the piss that I made a heart,  but you know, love's a scary thing, right?

Mathilde's pumpkin was far superior to anything I could have managed. Unfairly, this was her first time as well!

Spoooooky! I cut the bottom teeth the wrong way round so they all fell off. Whoops!

Yes, someone did a jizzing cock pumpkin...

There's more Halloween fun to come. On Wednesday I think everybody I've ever met in Tours and more are all headed to one of the Irish pubs. Handily, the 1st of November is a public holiday in France, so everyone can kick up their heels without worrying about work the next day. You'll have to stay tuned to discover my (not very exciting) costume!

Just a technical note to finish on - I reached my free photo storage limit on Blogger, so I added my other gmail address as a "blog author" and hey presto, I can upload photos again! So now you'll see some posts by Gwan and some by Gwannel, but it's all me. Everyone seems to say Wordpress is better than Blogger etc. but I've had the blog for over 6 years now, so I'd rather just keep the continuity going if possible.

On Halloween, part 2

Luckily in my last post about Halloween I did say I was willing to participate in it as a boozy, adult activity, otherwise I'd look pretty silly right about now, ha ha! Anyway, I got a text when I was in Poitiers asking if I wanted to go out for some Halloween drinks. Since I wasn't working the next day, I thought it sounded like a fine idea. But then the next text asked if I had any costume to wear, since they were planning to dress up. Erm, no? And being in Poitiers (more on that later), I had no way to assemble one anyway.

I racked my brains (not very hard, as we shall see) and all I could come up with was 'sexy librarian', on the grounds that people could quibble with the sexy part, but there's no arguing with the librarian bit (although actually, French people do, they always call me a 'documentaliste', which annoys me for some reason). This literally involved putting on clothes I would wear to work anyway, adding patterned tights, shiny red shoes, a belt, glasses, hair in a bun, red lipstick and, the pièce de résistance, unbuttoning the top two buttons of my cardi. Ha ha!

I then amused myself with a home photo shoot of the results. I should put a disclaimer here that, despite the stereotype, librarians do not all wear glasses, have their hair in a bun, and spend their time shushing people. Also, the people you see in libraries shelving books are almost certainly not librarians. That's below my pay grade dahlink. Also a disclaimer that these are just me pissing about, not seriously going for sexy!

I had enormous fun by myself at home, music playing, getting ready and larking about taking photos, and then the actual night out was really average. Always the way, innit? I think I should just stay at home drinking and having one-person parties in future. Oh and I got a call from my friend partway through my little photo shoot to say that no-one was dressing up, so the sexy librarian never saw the light of day anyway! So this is a 'web exclusive'...

Just shelving, as usual, lalala... What's that, a camera?!


SHHHH!


You're not trying to return a book after the due date I hope?

On Halloween

Around this time of year, you tend to get a lot of (mostly) Americans expressing horror at the idea that I (and the French) didn't grow up celebrating Halloween. Don't I feel like I missed out? Well, no, actually. To take the example of another festival going on right now, it's like asking if you (presuming you don't celebrate it) feel like you've been missing out on Diwali for all these years. I'm guessing your probable reaction would be something along the lines of "looks great, it would be fun to take part in some time, but it's not part of my culture so no, I don't feel as though I missed out on it".

Sure, as a kid it would have been great to dress up and get given a lot of free chocolate by people. Well, actually, maybe not so much the dressing up part. We weren't really a "dressing up" family. Infamously, one year when I was about 5 or 6 (and my Mum is probably going to cringe hearing this brought up again), for the school Book Week my older brother got kitted out as Biggles (fictional ace fighter pilot) which included having the plane built around him, whereas I (the family's limited energy for That Sort Of Thing having been exhausted) got to go as The Paper Bag Princess. In case you're wondering, to the best of my recollection, that involved cutting a neck-hole in a heavy paper rubbish sack and sending me off to school in it. I couldn't sit down in the thing all day. Apart from school plays, I remember dressing up one other time as a kid, which was Pippi Longstocking (also for Book Week, I think). I can't remember what Pippi Longstocking wears exactly, but I think it consisted mostly of stripey tights and putting my hair in plaits with wires in to make them stick out. So yeah, not really ones for going all out in that department.

But even as a kid, I was aware of Halloween from books, and I honestly don't remember feeling like I wished I could take part in it. Sure, I wished I could be like Claudia Kishi with exotic-sounding American "candy" stashed all around my room, but I never remember wishing to acquire said candy at Halloween. (How I longed as a child to be eating HoHos and Babe Ruths and whatever else you have. Then I grow up and discover almost everything has peanuts in it. Gross. I have a (stupid) theory that the chief cultural divide between Europe and the United States is that, in America, everything has peanuts in it, and in Europe, everything has hazelnuts in it...) If anything, I wanted to be a little English girl enjoying Devonshire teas and lashings of ginger beer on the lawn, not a little American girl going trick or treating and watching out for razor blades in my apples (seriously, what kid wants apples if there's chocolate on offer anyway? It's like how my Mum and Dad - sorry, Santa - used to put an apple and an orange in my Christmas stocking because that was a treat when they were little. War's over, Mum and Dad!).

And as an adult, the whole idea of Halloween (other than strictly adult-only costume parties involving lots of booze - and even then, I still don't really have the dressing-up gene) appalls me. I'm going to sound like the Halloween version of the grinch, but I don't like children. The idea of having troupes of them coming to my door and demanding MY chocolate is the stuff of nightmares as far as I'm concerned. (Now I probably am going to have a nightmare about it and wake up screaming, "My chocolate! My chocolate!" and chewing the pillow.) And the whole idea of 'trick or treat' is really offputting. I don't know whether in real life people actually go around egging houses or throwing toilet paper in trees like in the movies, but the underlying concept of "give us stuff or we'll exact our revenge" is horrible. It kind of reminds me of the tipping thing - again, I expect in real life it's not as extreme as you see on TV, but the whole trope of the badly-tipped waitress spitting in your food or your mailman breaking your packages etc. is just nasty from where I'm standing.

As with most aspects of American culture, Halloween seems to be catching on more and more at home (at least when I left). Next thing you know we'll be celebrating Thanksgiving... Of course I don't think this is any sort of deliberate cultural imperialist ploy by the average American citizen - for one thing, my English Dad (I don't have an English Dad and another Dad, just to be clear) has stories of carving turnip lanterns at Halloween as a kid (much to the general mirth of the family, who think that's about the most country bumpkin-ish thing we've ever heard) - but it is in the interest of American (and other) manufacturers of chocolate, decorations, costumes etc. to rope as many people around the world into these things as they can. Add in all the American films, TV, and books and Halloween just becomes normal to the younger generations. Well, fun as it may be (and I don't begrudge anyone else celebrating it, nor am I saying that I am anti celebrating it myself) it's never been an important thing to me, and that's why I've never felt cheated out of growing up with Halloween.

(PS I feel I should say that I realise this might come off as anti-American - it's not meant to be, I respect you have your traditions and that Halloween isn't a purely American invention anyway, I'm just trying to explain my cultural perspective on things. Also, this isn't aimed at any specific person, I've just heard it a lot over the years that French people are missing out on Halloween, or I've missed out on Halloween, so this is just something to think about if at this time of year you're looking around you at the lack of Halloween celebrations here in France and thinking "oh those poor kids". It would suck to be the one kid out of everyone you know who's not participating, but if no-one is, I don't think you really care.)