I got so sick of hearing that "Argentines don't DO Halloween." Well let me tell you something mister, I would do Halloween if I had to do it on the MOON. What started out as a quiet pumpkin carving party turned out to be a 30-person affair at which not one person carved a pumpkin. Turns out the big pumpkins we carve back home are only available down here in mid-winter (July), and when we decided to make it a costume party and BYOP with the mini-versions from the grocery store, everyone petered out on that one.
Not that we missed the carving. There was good music, a LOT of good food, and exactly the right number of people for the terrace party room and terrace. In fact, rather than say anything else about it, I'll let the pictures do the talking.
Here's me getting my Cheshire Cat hair and nails did, by my new exclusive hair lady and my number one Mad Hatter, Kelly.
Our final products. If you can't tell, we're Mad. It's probably from the spray paint hairspray fumes. I didn't have my grin in this one...
This is our (male) friend Manu, dressed as Eve, in the party room. It was the perfect place, and I had some great decorations thanks to Mom and Lara!
Kelly got a little artsy. Bats flying over the firepit full of votives.
Group shot. Unfortunately several people had already left or were holding cameras by this point, but you get the general idea. There are a million pictures, and I can post more upon request, but most of you have facebook, so you can see them there!
Regardless, it was great fun, and were it not memorable beforehand, it would have become extremely memorable to the last 13 of us. It got down to that number and the people other than me split down the middle - six decided to help clean up a bit, six ran for the elevator. The party room is on the tenth floor and you need a key to get out the front door, so Kelly offered to take a group down, and five people smashed into the elevator with her. Turns out that was a pretty bad idea, as the elevator reached the ground floor but the excess weight made the elevator floor sink below level with the floor, so the elevator door wouldn't open.
The encargado (super) couldn't be roused through banging, ringing, or yelling, and my landlord doesn't have a spare set of keys. So there were six people hyperventilating in the elevator and six more sitting on the steps for just under an hour at about 3am while I did stairs. I think we'd have had to call the fire department were it not for the fact that one of the people inside the elevator eventually tripped the safety latch in the doorjamb with a teaspoon, letting everyone out. Of course the elevator still didn't work for the rest of the night, so Kelly, Bret and I got to do the stairs one more time to get everything out of upstairs and back down to my apartment. Then it was just a 40 minute shower to get the purple out of my hair before a nice, early 5:30am bedtime. Needless to say, I did NOTHING on Saturday.
It was a good time. Met a couple cool new people, got to see a few people I hadn't seen in a while. Was left with horrific amounts of unhealthy leftovers and a war zone of a home I just finally started feeling like I could reclaim today. But it's Halloween, by which I mean, any and all efforts were well worth it.
Now I've just got three weeks before Ray and Ronda come to town and Thanksgiving! Something to which I can look forward, and three weeks to actually DO SOME SCHOOL WORK in the interim!
Hope you all had a wonderful, spooky, stomach-achingly sweet Halloween. All my love.
