Halloween Party 2

My party outfit.

My friend invited me to a Halloween party. Since I had just been to the Sapporo Zombie Walk I went to the party as a zombie.

Two years ago, this friend and her friends invited me to go to Bon-Odori, a kind of traditional summer dance thing. "Let's all go in yukatas!" Yukata is a summer kimono, and one of the chances of wearing this without looking out of place is at the Bon-Odori. So it was decided two months in advance that everyone had to come wearing their yukatas.

I had to go straight from work at the university to get their in time, so I spent a whole day at work dressed in yukata. Fairly popular with the ladies in the student cafeteria, but I was stared at a lot, and my professor asked me what in the world I was doing?! He also took a picture of me.

When I showed up to the Bon-Odori, no one else was wearing a yukata, only me. "It would have been too much work to change at work", "I have my yukata at my parents place", all kinds of creative excuses (during these two months, couldn't you have picked it up when you visited your parents?) were to be found, but no yukatas.

So when I was invited to a party and told "Everyone has to come dressed in a funny costume!", that event sprang to mind. Indeed, when I came to the party there were three men and five women already there, and a total of 0 of them were wearing costumes. One had a ribbon in her hair, which may have counted as being dressed up. Two more showed up later, none wearing costumes.

There was some screaming when people first saw me, and the one girls that I had actually met before did not recognize me when she came to the party.

 
 There was a lot of very nice food at the party! And after a while, people started changing into costumes. Some were quite good. One guy dressed up as a Japanese office worker, in a suit, with his hair combed slick and wearing nerdy glasses. A bit like me dressing up like a foreigner the night before. The best was a guy dressed up to look like Winnie the Pooh.

Winnie the Pooh and a Halloween pumpkin.

Other costumes.

Winnie the Pooh looking kind of obscene.

There was also a bingo game that was kind of funny. One girl handed out bingo cards to everyone. She also ran the software to select bingo numbers in a supposedly fair way. She also got bingo first of all... There was a price in the bingo game, and only a price for the very first person to get bingo. She got it and claimed that while it did indeed look a bit suspicious, there was not cheating going on :-)

The results of the costume competition!

There was also a costume competition. I think Winnie the Pooh deserved to win, but I won. I got a weird little figurine as first price in the costume competition.

My prize!

I was asked to do some magic, and tried to do a short performance dressed as a zombie. This was more difficult than expected. With my hands covered in paint (and some blood) the way things slide against the fingers was very different from normal. This made all kinds of things difficult. I often put a pen behind my ear as a magic trick too, but this almost failed since my hair was caked stiff by having lots of fake blood in it. All in all, a fun and interesting experience. People said they had never seen a zombie do magic before.

Then I left to take the subway back home again. People stared in the train, but at least there were less people in the subway at midnight. People near my home also stopped and stared from time to time, and some asked if it was because of Halloween. I said yes.