Halloween!

China Blog 15

So my blog posts are coming more slowly. Sorry ‘bout that.

We hit the November 1 Early Action/Early Decision deadline last week. Thank goodness Helen (my boss) told us we could leave work early on November 2, since we were all so exhausted. I looked at more than 50 essays between the beginning of Monday and the end of the day Thursday, not to mention the number of students I met with.

I suppose the best upside has been the Halloween celebrations. There have been quite a few requests for pictures of me, so I have some from when I dressed up for Halloween on Saturday night. We went to Taste Bistro for a Halloween party last night; lots of delicious food and young kids running around in adorable costumes. The band played some great music, but we weren’t a talkative bunch last night and went home kinda early for a Saturday. 

Dominique went as a time traveler (note the awesome steampunk goggles!):

I went as a goth. My coworkers looked shocked when they saw the black lipstick. I couldn't find temporary black hair dye: 

A better shot of the skull scarf that I found in a store called Kawaii for 25 yuan: 

We had a Halloween party for our students on Sunday October 28. It wasn’t really a Halloween party as we might recognize one in the United States. They had stations where different clubs hosted activities, a few performances on a makeshift stage that everyone sat down to watch, and about ten minutes of dancing (boys and girls were not allowed to touch each other!) in which they did a conga line to Gangnam Style. (If you haven’t heard of Gangnam Style, you should look it up on Youtube. It’s kind of a sensation right now.)

The internet has been extremely difficult to work with recently because of a conference in Beijing. Google especially has been really hard to access, and since I use gmail for work, life has been a little annoying. Our VPNs only work part of the time right now and websites we usually rely on have been difficult to access. Hopefully it will get better in a couple of weeks, but right now getting on Facebook and Blogspot is quite difficult.

So yeah, not much to report. Life is certainly settling down and work is picking up.