Of Mice and Maggots

Happy Halloween, everyone! Here in Korea, Halloween isn't really a big deal, but the kids at school couldn't say no to "Candy Day," so we decided to have a party yesterday. Two parties to be exact: one for the younger group (7 and 8 year olds) and another for the older kids (9-15). Katie and I thought it would be cool to put together a haunted house where the kids would touch "body parts." There were four bowls: blood, fingers, eyeballs and the brain. The blood was water with red food coloring and something else to make it thicker, the fingers were baby carrots, the eyeballs were peeled grapes and the brain was spaghetti noodles. We blindfolded the older kids so they couldn't pick up the food and look at it, but the younger kids were so scared even with their eyes open that almost none of them made it to the final bowl their first time through. A few of them wanted to go through twice and they were still scared the second time! Other events included mask-making, an egg relay race, pinatas filled with candy and pumpkin carving. We played creepy Halloween music over the loud speakers the entire time; it really freaked them out when they first stepped into the gymnasium when the lights were off, haha!

We've noticed that Koreans are scared pretty easily. I guess they just haven't been exposed to as many horror movies and gory scenes as we have been. Earlier in the week, I wore a scary mask around the school to get the kids excited about the party on Friday. I meant to scare the kids, but I ended up scaring the teachers! The first time, I snuck up on our secretary with the mask on and my hood pulled up over it. She didn't scream but she shielded her eyes for several seconds while she collected herself. She told me not to do it again. The second time, I was walking around a corner and ran into a different teacher. She screamed so loud that a bunch of people came out of the classrooms to check on her and see what had happened. She was so embarrassed that she hit me! After that, I decided to save the mask for the actual party :P

I'm sure by now you're wondering about the title of this post. Well, apparently pumpkins aren't very common around here and we got them last minute anyway, so they were kind've rotten. The insides were soupy and they were crawling with maggots. Unfortunately, we didn't realize this until we had cut into them and started carving the faces. Neither Katie nor I had had much experience with maggots, so it surprised us both that they could ball themselves up and then jump. Pretty soon, dozens of little maggots were jumping out of the eyes, noses, and mouths of the pumpkins. After the kids left, it was our job to clean up the pumpkins, maggots and all. By "our," I mean Gerard and me, because the girls were too scared :P This is the part where I notice that a dead mouse is lying conspicuously on the top of the newspaper in the trash can. The discovery of the mouse freaked out the girls even more. No one knew how it got there, which is weird because it was lying right there on the top of the trash after we had finished cleaning up. My theory is that it crawled into our stack of newspaper and suffocated in its sleep. Katie's theory is that it was inside one of the pumpkins, lol.

Although it was an unusual Halloween, it will definitely be a memorable one for us.
It's getting close to Christmas time, so if anyone wants anything from Korea, let us know and we'll try our best to get it for you. Happy Halloween! Eat lots of candy for us!