Greetings
readers!
As I’m sure you were all aware, All
Hallows’ Eve has just passed us. Obviously China doesn’t really celebrate this
holiday – but being a language school, EF had an activity on for the evening,
which I was SUPER excited about. The idea was to have various rooms set up and
decorated, each with a different foreign teacher and activity for the students
to do. I chose to do face/mask painting; other activities included musical
tombstones (musical chairs but for Halloween), the classic close your eyes and
put your hand in a box and say what you feel game, dressing students up as
mummies and others. The plan was simple: split the students into groups (8 in
total with about 16 students in each) and with careful time management (each
teacher was only allowed 12 minutes to run their activity before they were
supposed to pack the students up and make way for the next group), move them
out of each room so the whole evening was only running for two hours. This idea
was obviously easier said than put into practice!
But before I get into that, I have to say
the most fun part of the evening was dressing up and getting ready with my
co-workers. Now the school ‘chose’ Superheroes as the theme for the staff to
dress up as, but this theme wasn’t really stuck to – we had vampires, Hermoine
from Harry Potter, some comic book villains and more. I decided originally to
go as Storm from the X-Men (the school provided our costumes – though all I
requested was a white wig), but then to add that little something Halloween-y
to it, changed to Zombie Storm (see below). I went a bit mad on Pinterest and
Youtube in the weeks leading up to Halloween finding the best tutorials on how
to do my face and make realistic looking zombie bites/wounds – I don’t know
why, but I was super into this holiday this year! I really freaked some of the
students/parents/Chinese staff out with my costume too which was great.
Anyways, as I have - quite frankly - awesome nail painting skills, people
assumed I’d be good at face painting, so I spent the first part of the evening
painting the faces of my colleagues which was fun. Then the mayhem commenced…
It wasn’t TOO bad to be honest. Firstly
though, the main problem I encountered was that most, if not all, of the
students did not actually want their faces painted. Boring bastards! But the
school had given me these masks as an alternative for the younger students, so
I just ended up using all of those, and the others could just paint their
hands/arms. Such funny kids over here. Then the worst part of the evening was
the timing issue. Twelve minutes is not a lot of time to paint anything really
– especially when you have to explain what we’re doing/hand out supplies before
anyone picks up a brush. But the event flew by and before I knew it, I was
handing out sweets and saying goodbye. Thank goodness. Afterwards a few of my
friends and I went to a Halloween party at a popular bar in the city which was
fun – but I couldn’t stay too long as I was working the next day. Bummer.
So that’s
Halloween in a nutshell! Now I’m curious/apprehensive about what the school
will plan for their Christmas activity – just hope we get to dress up again!
Here are a
few pics for your delight:
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| Practice bite! |
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| Contouring |
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| My rotting zombie skin |
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| The final costume! Apart from getting an egg head with the wig, I think it all worked out nicely! |
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| Storm and Snow White (aka Michelle) |
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| Storm and Poison Ivy (aka Dylis, aka one of the nicest people to work with!) |
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| Painting in action |
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| This kid wanted a spider web |
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| More in action |
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| And again! |
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| Two of my favourite students - Vicky and Cici They were pretty freaked out by my costume |
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| Staff pic! (Excuse my awkward smile) |
P.S. You may
have noticed a difference in font/effects on my photos – I’m writing this post
on my new laptop (MAC!) so still experimenting with everything on here until I
find things I like.
Until next time
xoxo
