Halloween

Ok, the time has come to finally post about Halloween. It took a while to round up pictures.










There's no way to actually convey the magnitude of what we pulled off here, but I'll try. We.made.a.haunted.house.

We'd tossed around the idea in the early days of China but weren't sure how it could be pulled off. Now that it's just Brad and me out of the original "party making 5" we weren't sure it could be done. But we did it!

We turned the stairway of our 6-floor (probably condemned) building into 6 floors of terror! Our plan was to get some of our closest Chinese friends to help by having groups be in charge of a floor and planning it out and getting the stuff. Yeah right. Brad and I did most of it, but they had a blast once it was all together. And I'm sure they'll never forget it! Sadly we don't have good pictures of everything because it was complete chaos before the Haunted House opened, but here's what we've got...

We had "tour guides" to lead small groups of petrified students up to the sixth floor and back down.

















First floor: Graveyard. We made paper tombs, had some zombies and mummies walking around, and even rented a fog machine!






























Second floor: Dracula and his lady victim, complete with paper coffin and bats. (We do actually have bats that fly in the stairwell but I don't know if they came that night.)















Third floor: A witch with a huge cauldron and a boy tied up beside her. (Brad was not the boy. He was in charge of general terror and noise making.)






















Fourth floor: Chinese restaurant, complete with scary butcher and live head on a table!















Fifth floor: Insane Asylum/Flashback to "The Ring". It was scary.





















Sixth floor: Haunted Hospital - while the original idea was to have a patient on the table and doctors working on him, this group took poetic license (wish we totally encourage) and set up a table to feast on the post-operation goods. Gross. In China it certainly isn't hard to buy intestines and "innards" at your local market. That might be the scariest of all! :)
















Now what was my job you ask? I was the "Gatekeeper."



















Basically I stood outside trying in vain to do crowd control. Have I ever mentioned that Chinese people are pushers? I almost lost my mind more than once. Every time I would open the door to let a group in, the entire mass would push forward. At some points I couldn't even open the door to let people out! It was a nightmare. Thankfully one of Brad's students stepped up and helped me organized people into some semblance of order. I had dreams for several nights after that that we did the Haunted House again and I was able to get people to line up single file. Ha!

I think there had to have been nearly 400 people come through. It was ridiculous. Brad and I told all of our students, and then of course, students tells students. We opened the doors at 7:30 and went until 10. Many people stood in line for over an hour. Craziness!

But I think overall, it was a success. A success I never want to do again. :) Most people were pretty scared by it (though it isn't hard at all to scare a Chinese girl) and some even ran out before they reached the top.

Here's the whole Haunted crew...














We did it again.