Halloween on the MV Explorer

After two months of planning, the big day has come and gone on the MV Explorer. The day was a pretty typical class day, except for the fact that we pulled out of Burma around lunch time (in accordance with the tides).

Dinner marked the beginning of the Halloween events. The Halloween committee had specially named all the dinner foods with gruesome names, such as liver and blood sandwiches for the PB&J. The dining room staff pulled out all the stops and made up a pretty colorful menu with all the names and had carved pumpkins on display in the dining room. It was very festive. I didn’t have time for dinner, because I was busy decorating the classrooms (for community colleges) and the seventh deck (for the dance), but I did grab a quick liver and blood sandwich.

After dinner, people donned their costumes and trick-or-treating began. Randomly, I had decided to dress up as a
punk rock princess with a couple of my friends (Lauren, Kristen, and Tiffany) the night before we left Myanmar. We found cute and cheap little tiaras at the market on the last day. So, I ended up in a really silly, but cute, colorful outfit with a Tiara. I will post a picture as soon as I’m able to charge up my computer and download them (remember I’m still begging a charger from someone else-so, I’m on one of the public computers right now). It was really just a fun, silly outfit. I had fun with it. Anyways, I stayed by my room to hand out candy to all the trick-or-treaters. I got a good mixture of the ship kids and college students. Everyone was so creative and I took lots of pictures. It was really fun to see what everyone came up with, with such limited resources.

After trick-or-treating, I ran up to one of the classrooms to host the Scary Story community college. There was also a pumpkin carving community college led by the man who does all the carving in the dining room. Anyways, my community college was sort of an open mic event. I had a couple people ready to tell stories and then as I hoped, everyone just chimed in with their stories. The dining room staff provided us with taffy apples and pumpkin seeds to snack on. It went off pretty well overall.

After the community colleges, it was time for the costume contest. It was crazy. We must have had sixty or seventy individuals/groups enter. There were some amazing costumes. We had nineteen individual winners. Some of the winners were dressed as a hookah, Gandhi, a rickshaw, a geisha girl, and the map channel. There were tons of other really creative costumes though too. My friend Noel (who’s mom reads this) had the prettiest belly dancer/concubine costume. She sewed the top herself and wore a sari and some really elaborate jewelry that she bought in India. She looked absolutely beautiful and if I would have been judging, she would have won something.

Anyways, after the costume contest, it was time for the dance up on the seventh deck. It went from 9 until 12. It was a really fun time despite all the initial complaints that it was not a pub night and was hot outside.

Well, that’s Halloween in a nutshell. It was a great time, but I’m glad that I have something off my plate (Halloween Committee). Now, I just have the Ambassador’s Ball to plan. We are selling tickets starting today. We’re getting down to crunch time here. I’ll post a picture when I can. Please send Halloween stories and pictures from home.

Best wishes!!!