BOO!

I spent a couple hours over the weekend looking up Halloween activities on the internet. Our school is going to have a party. Last year, we didn't bother, since the occasion fell on a Sunday. The year before, they had some kind of event, and then a whole mass of students trekked up the big huge hill to my apartment, which used to belong to the previous teacher. Can you imagine that? Trick-or-treating at one door?

When I was younger, I lived in an 20 storey building, with 15 apartments per floor, and it was part of a set of triplet buildings. So we had 900 doors-for-the-knocking. Now THAT'S trick-or-treating! In my two final years of dressing up and knocking on doors at Halloween, I went and spent the night at my best friend Melanie's house. She lived up in the north end of the city amongst posh houses. Trick or treating wasn't as effective there, time-wise, but the loot was much better. People there gave out the full-sized chocolate bars. Yeah!

So, back to Halloween at my school. The kids came up the hill to knock on the door and then go away. It didn't work out too well, I heard, as the neighbours complained about all the noise.

So this year, we will have no trick or treating. Instead, we'll have 4 hours worth of "Golden Bell" quizzes. It goes something like all the kids get asked questions, true or false to begin with, and more specific as the field narrows. Each hour will produce a few champions and then we'll have the final grand-slam championship. Then from 6 to 8 we'll have games and activities and such. This was where my research came in.

So I stayed an extra hour and a half after work going through my ideas (well, ideas I lifted from the net) and working out what kinds of materials we'll need. I tried to talk my boss into a trip to COSTCO in Daegu this weekend. I don't know about the COSTCO here, but the one in Japan is always well stocked with Halloween and Christmas goodies. Besides, I have ulterior motives. I want cheese.

We're going to have Bobbing for Apples, Boo-Bingo, Pumpkin Bowling, a Spooky Scavenger Hunt, and an Arts and Crafts area. For the latter, we'll be making "glass deco" images, and a skeleton on a stick. The glass deco is like coloured glue which, when it dries, becomes a stained glass sticker you can stick on a window, or anything else. I'm providing the kits, and will be doing the outlines for the younger kids. For the skeleton, it's from the Ben and Jerry's Halloween website:

Cute, eh?

Unfortunately, I've been assigned a mini-scavenger hunt of my own. I had to describe what a "paper fastener" was. My boss had never heard of one, even with the spot on diagrams I was drawing. Like this:


So I have no idea where I'm going to find them. Surely Office Depot will have them. Are there Office Depots here? Is there even such a thing as an office supply store? I don't know. I went down to HomePlus tonight to see if maybe they had them. Nope. They were not amongst the paper clips or thumbtacks. Then I thought if I were a paper fastener, I'd probably live somewhere near the hole punches. Birds of a feather kind of thing. Nope. No hole punches either.

I might have to try re-delegating this task. Finding paper fasteners in Canada, no problem. Here,....kind of a problem. Besides, I'll be busy making about 200 of these...