Happy Halloween from Yinchuan

It's always interesting to discover and experience the holidays and festivals of another culture, but it's also interesting to see how other cultures celebrate the holidays that we hold dear at home. This week was one of the Western world's favourite holidays, Halloween, and as it turns out it's not too different on the other side of the world. Not that that should really be too surprising.

Halloween has the holiday trifecta: costumes, candy and childishness. For children this means running around screaming in a sugar induced haze, and for adults...well, it's pretty much the same.

Teachers gone spooky!

Our first taste of Halloween was at school when suddenly, over night, school turned into another world of pumpkins, giant spiders and general spookiness. It really was something quite impressive and certainly gave the kids something new to scream about, which is always nice for the ears and sanity. On actual Halloween night the school held a party for the 190 kids who were lucky enough to bag a coveted ticket. In a vague attempt to emulate the traipsing from house to house that is trick-or-treating, each downstairs classroom was transformed into a spooky game that each group had to complete to win candy and other treats. Each teacher was allocated a room and we had the joy of playing and cheering for the same game for the entirety of the party.

The CT's get into the spirit of things.

My room's game was the 'Pumpkin Dash', a cryptically named game that is essentially a hockey drill. Use a broom to push a little pumpkin around and under obstacles of chairs and blocks before a victorious shoot over the finish line. Easy. Sadly, it very quickly became evident that none of these children had ever played anything that even resembled hockey. Cue serious struggles to conquer the course, to the teachers cackling delight and the rest of the teams obvious frustration. I would say that my starring moment of the evening was when one team was a player short and so I was drafted onto the team; immediately my year 8 hockey training kicked in and I nimbly manoeuvred the course to a stunning victory and the cheers of my very young team mates. Who ever said winning to someone less than half your age isn't rewarding has never been cheered and high fived by a team of sugar high pre-teens. Exhilarating stuff.

I think by the end of the night I was more buzzed than most of the kids and left school cackling in my cape and having a thoroughly good time. No night can ever go badly when dressed in a shiny red cape.

The Monday after Halloween Jenny and I hosted our very first Halloween Party in China, which turned out to be a very messy affair.

The pre-party preparations largely involved scrubbing our filthy hovel of a home from top to bottom until it resembled something vaguely habitable, but predictably the clean only lasted for about two hours before we opened our doors and the party began.

We literally invited everyone we knew to our party and because that included both Chinese and Westerners we started early, 6.30 early. For our Chinese guests that was great, they don't really drink and tend to head home pretty early so they got a good few hours socialising in before heading demurely home, having had a jolly good time. But, for the Westerners parties are a different kettle of fish all together. When the drinks start flowing at 6.30, and when some of those drinks are shots of the infamous and deadly baijiu, things get merry pretty quickly. Soon enough the boys were partaking in some serious male bonding in the form of non-competitive competitions of strength for fun – just as ridiculous as it sounds – including rounds of squatting and planking, and the girls were looking on bemused.

“Shall we do non-competitive planking for fun too?!”

“No, don't be ridiculous. We're ladies, not animals.”

The Girls

One of our Chinese friends brought his four year old son to the party, at first we were a bit confused and concerned. Why would you bring a 4 year old to a party where there was going to be a lot of alcohol? Won't he be a confused and unhappy toddler? But how wrong we were. As is turns out, a baby is the perfect accessory for any party; they love to chat, they love to dance, and best of all they are so damn cute. Rayray was truly a little celebrity for the evening.

By 11pm, the time we told the neighbours that we'd be quiet by (we are good neighbours after all), our Chinese friends had gone home and the majority of the remaining party was pretty out of it. Our apartment was a state and someone had thrown up all over our bathroom (of which the culprit remains a mystery), it was time for the wasted to go home and the survivors to head out.

All in all Halloween was successful and really not all the different to how it might have been at home, admittedly with a lot more Chinese children involved. But what do you expect, this is China.

Sharing a yoghurty moment with a toddler.