Time for Halloween

Friday, 31 October: Greenwich is a tourist trap. Well, at least the line at the observatory is. It's just a line on the pavement and some clocks on a wall. Not very exciting. And you have to hike up a pretty darn steep hill to get there. For a line on the pavement. Yet Greenwich was not without its attractions. We travelled there by boat on the Thames, and that was very fun. Having already been to most of the landmarks by the river it was mostly, "Oh, we've walked that bridge" or "We've been up that dome." And the National Maritime Museum alone was worth seeing. They have an incredible collection on Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, naval hero of the Napoleonic Wars. They have on display the coat and socks he was wearing when he died at the Battle of Trafalgar. You can even see the bullet hole left by the bullet that killed him. It was incredible! But that was partly do to my being an absolute nut for maritime history. And the Napoleonic Wars. But I still recommend a trip to the Maritime Museum. They had a lot of really good exhibits and some hands-on things as well.



And of course, it was Halloween. The holiday is not hugely celebrated, but it is known and acknowledged. And any excuse for a party and all that. Dinner wasn't anything special, but they did give us all bags of little Cadbury chocolates. The excitement was great. Most of us ended up dressing up just for the fun of it. There was a group that went as Peter Pan. They had a Wendy, Peter, Cpt. Hook, Tinkerbell, and Princess Tiger Lily. Then there was the two girls who decided one to be from the 1950s and the other from the 1980s, a sort of mother and daughter. Then we had a couple Harry Potter costumes. We also had a group of Bond girls, who of course spent the evening going to the recently released new Bond movie. And we also had three members of Kiss terrorizing everyone in the Centre without even trying-- their makeup was scary enough on its own. Then there was my room. Somehow we decided to be crayons, each of us dressed completely in one colour and then with model-like makeup in that colour as well. We had orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, and white. I was white. The best and most amusing part of all this dressing up was that everyone was borrowing clothes from each other to put a costume together. I borrowed a skirt and lent out a shawl; people were switching coats and scarves and tights. The most extreme case of clothes trading was Michael, the one and only boy of the group. He was part of Kiss, but didn't have a black shirt or black pants. So he borrowed a shirt from one girl, and one of our tallest girl's pants-- added to the makeup that some girls allowed him to use for his face.



After all the getting ready and taking pictures, Kiss, the Crayons, and Harry Potter students went trick or treating up to the professors' flats. But since they didn't have candy it was more along the lines of us bringing a "party button" that when pressed played a part of "I'm Going to Rock and Roll all Night and Party Everyday", and then we would sing and dance at the door to the button. After this we all went out for a Snog. No, not what you think. There was no kissing involved. Snog is a frozen yogurt place that has a whole bunch of fruits and nuts and chocolates that you can order in a semi-sweetened frozen yogurt. I got one with strawberries and banana. It was amazingly delicious. They had pomegranites, honey, apples, marshmallows, and all sorts of other things available too. When we returned home after the Snogs, we all told scary stories in our room before giving up and going to bed. We had thought to watch a scary movie, but exhaustion defeated that pretty quickly. But it was still an incredibly fun evening.