Halloween

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I decided that I wanted to celebrate Halloween with my roommates. At home, Halloween is a big thing. Everyone ends up participating in it in some way. Between Halloween parties and trick-or-treaters Halloween is blatantly there. Here in England it's not such a big deal. Yea, there is Halloween stuff sold and some kids do go trick or treating but it's not as widespread. When I out that my roommates had never carved pumpkins I decided that I had to get pumpkins for them to carve. About a week ago I stopped at ASDA on the way home from Leeds and picked up two pumpkins. I then proceeded to haul them on the train and up the hill to my flat. For the next week the guys kept throwing them around and saying how they wanted to throw them out the windows. I should have know that Halloween would end up interesting.

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I need to quote Wikipedia real quick so that you understand the environment that leads to the rest of my story. "Guy Fawkes Night (also known as Bonfire Night) is an annual celebration on the evening of the 5th of November. It celebrates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of the 5th of November 1605 in which a number of Roman Catholic conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament." So now a days this is celebrated by fireworks, which can be bought practically everywhere in Bradford. Fireworks have been going off for like the past two weeks pretty much nightly. So Tuesday I told all my roommates to meet in the kitchen at 9pm for pumpkin carving. I invited Josie and Ramsey and Ben brought three of his friends over and Ayo had two friend over too. It started off all nice and innocent with the pumpkin carving. I let them carve the pumpkins and I started sorting the seeds to bake later. Then Ayo and the guys decide that they want to  blow up the pumpkins with fireworks. Ayo pays me the pound for his pumpkin and heads downstairs with it. There is part of me freaking out becuase I'm pretty sure that your not allowed to set off fireworks on the lawn, but then there's the excitement of blowing up something. So four guys go down to set it off and the rest of us watch from the kitchen window. It really did explode, bits of pumpkin were scattered all over the lawn. The guys run back up to the flat and we close the window curtains because we don't want security to come and see us. We probably should  have left it with one pumpkin but they got so excited they wanted to do another one. This time I sent my camcorder down with Ben so that we could get it on film. It took them almost 5 minutes to lite this one, well these two. The fireworks started exploding out of the top of the pumpkin before it exploded twice. We were in the kitchen cleaning the pumpkin seeds, Josie and I were standing at the sink. Ben, Ramsey and a couple others were still working on a couple pumpkins. There was still pumpkin stuff all over the kitchen. I turned around and there was the security guard standing in our kitchen asking of we had anything to do with the pumpkins outside. Ayo, who's fireworks they were was in his room on the computer.I just pointed at the pumpkins still on the counter and said these were mine. He left, but then about 5 minutes later the main Hall Warden (RA) comes in and asks us if those were our pumpkins outside. Again we said that our pumpkins were here in the kitchen. I felt really bad becuase George, the warden is a really nice guy, and I've talked with him before. He looks at us and says, "Well I'm not going to treat you like little children, but if you have had something to do with the pumpkins listen up. If you didn't then I apologize." He then proceeded to ask us to not explode or throw any more pumpkins out the windows. At the end we we all said something like "that sounds fair". So my Halloween in England was influenced by Bonfire night, an interesting mix. Wednesday night, actual Halloween day I went out with the Squash guys. Josie and I had gone shopping for "fancy dress" and tried to come up with something that was inexpensive to put together. I decided to go as a witch becuase I had a black dress already and black leggings and shoes. I found a green and black witch's hat for 2 pounds and a witch's broom for 1. We searched and found some bright red lipstick at a little store. When I started getting ready Kayleigh let me us her green eye-makeup and green eyeliner. I really liked my costume. I even had a black trench coat that worked perfectly with my costume. Rachel came up from her flat and we got ready together. She was dressing up in black as a Gothic person, I think. Anyways I got to draw a spiderweb on her face. We walked over to school together to meet the guys. We played some games with the Squash guys for a while. There were some pretty funny costumes and we ended up just joking around for a few hours. It was hard to concentrate and focus when the guy next to you is a vampire and on the other side is a guy in a French maid's dress. I had my broom, which only I could touch and hit people with. It was great fun. We went downtown after that and went to a couple clubs. It was really packed and too hard to dance and there wasn't really enough room to dance with a big witch's hat. Josie met up with us downtown and we met up with Ramsey and saw Ben. The Rugby team had to dress up as Halloween-Hawaiian. So basically Hawaiian shirts with lots of fake blood. As our Wednesday night routine goes we walked back to the halls with Rich and stopped at the Chinese take away on the way. This time we left a little later then usual and the place was packed. I had ate about half my food before Ramsey even got his.

There is part of me freaking out becuase I'm pretty sure that your not allowed to set off fireworks on the lawn, but then there's the excitement of blowing up something.