Halloweekend in Changsha

As much as the Chinese love their horror movies, Halloween is still a rather unobserved in China. But Halloween is one of the most popular holidays in the west. Spending is second only to Christmas, still earning retailer s whopping 8 billion dollars in US sales alone. It is also growing in popularity in the UK, with a 700% increase in costume sales there since 2009.

So what are expats to do when they love Halloween but are stuck in China? Mainly, improvise and/or plan ahead. There are lots of costumes on Taobao and shipping is usually pretty fast. But the sizes do tend to run small, so people who are tall or curvy still might not find anything. If you go home during summer vacation, plan ahead and buy a costume while you are home and bring it over with you. Or, if you want something really special, find a local seamstress with a good reputation to custom make you a costume from scratch.

Halloween this year was on the worst possible night, a Wednesday. Adults gotta work, kids got school. But many people celebrated the weekend before instead. R2Games had their annual Halloween party last Thursday night, and it was a blast. We rented out Mr. Beer all to ourselves, and that place is freaking amazing. They have good food, good booze (including delicious cocktails), and a pretty good Filipino band that plays English songs. Seth and I both got pretty smashed, but it was a lot of fun.

 

Seth and I brought most of our costume pieces with us from the states to go kind of Steampunk. We found out, though, that many people did not know what steampunk was, so here’s a link 🙂

Friday night was the annual Halloween pub crawl for the expat community. Our friend Damion did a great job advertising the event and getting people together. He also cobbled together his own Ghostbuster costume, which was amazing. The night began at Mr. Beer and ended at Hooligans.

We didn’t go to any parties or anything on actual Halloween (partly because we ended up working until 10 pm anyway), but we threw on some ghost and witch costumes and drove around looking at people. The bars were doing themed nights, but they were way too loud and crowded to even go in. But we did end up finding a few people to take pictures with.

So, even though Halloween hasn’t exactly caught on around here, fun is where you make it, so make it awesome!