Of course, back in the Old Country, Halloween is not traditionally celebrated. Note that I say "traditionally", because it's slowly been creeping up on Sweden over the last five years or so. I went to a few Halloween parties in my undergrad days, and I have actually been trick-or-treating. Probably surprised the hell out of people opening doors, too, since I was a good two feet taller than the average customer, and about three times older. Sadly, no-one brought a camera for that one.
Since October 31st falls on a Wednesday this year, the student population of Laramie unanimously decided that the preceding Saturday would be the best time to dress up and party. I'm not sure exactly how that was organized (a hive mind of some sort?), but when Joe called me up and said he had beer, a spectacularly ugly costume and girls at his house, I decided to go with the flow. After substantial work with make-up, wigs and garter belts, we were ready to hit the town:
My choice of custome kind of back-fired, though. While I thought I was cleverly representing all that was wrong with the 80's, I failed to take into account that most of the party-goers never experienced the days of yuppies and shoulder pads. I didn't catch more than the second half of the decade myself, and for someone born in 1988 words like "perestroika", "MC Hammer" and "hair spray" have precious little meaning. I got guesses ranging from Billy Ray Cyrus to Joe Dirt. Kids these days...
Most of the girls had invested a lot of time and work in their costumes, and it generally worked out very, very well. Joe had mentioned that this was a "perfect excuse to skank it up", and as usual he was spot on. I don't think I've seen people so scantily dressed outside of the Red Light District before, and I'd bet anything that this would actually be illegal in Utah. Every stereotype was in attendance: Sexy Cop, Short-Skirt Nurse, Skanky Squaw, Catwoman, Tinkerbell, etc. etc. My personal favorite was Slutty Nun - brought me right back to Catholic school, that. And since American women typically don't do the typical pre-diabetes weight gain until after college, the contents of the packaging weren't half bad either. Halloween comes highly recommended.
I've also been out climbing, of course. The winter seems to come in bursts around here, and we're in a sunshiny period right now:
Granted, Rand doesn't look dileriously happy about it, but he's a fun guy to go climbing with. We always seem to get up to some fun/sketchy/stupid shit when we go out -- probably due to a propensity to just "climb what looks good". Yesterday that habit found us sitting atop a small spire of rock, without any clear idea of how to get off. After some thinking, we just tossed the rope down below us, and Rand kind of slid down the incline, holding onto one of my feet while I gave him a "belay" consisting of me basically sitting up real straight and hoping he wouldn't fall very far. The dense fog in the morning didn't help the route-finding either:
On an entirely different note, I had a "Word of the Day" episode recently. I can usually navigate an English-speaking society without any major problems, but sometimes "liten tuva stjälper stort lass". During my attempts to make kladdkaka I learned the difference between "baking soda" (pure sodium bicarbonate) and "baking powder" (much diluted with something acidic and some starch). The former is about 100 times as potent a rising agent as the latter, and you can imagine my surprise when the cake suddenly just started boiling. After saving what I could, and spending almost two hours cleaning the other half of the kladdkaka from the oven floor, I ended up with something that looked semi-okay but had awful taste and texture:
Note to self: stick to yeast in the future. You never know what effects outgassing can have at altitude...
I'll leave you with some pictures of my fellow international grad students. From left to right that's me, Jatinder (India), Shu (China), nameless cutie (Turkmenistan, I think), Anton (Uzbekistan) and Lada (Russia). Note especially that Jeet is wearing his "winter clothing" indoors, which speaks volumes about how well it'll hold up when the mercury really drops around here. For some people, winter will come as a harsh surprise...
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