A Spanish Halloween

I thought I didn't have much to relate from this week. It seemed fairly uneventful, and then I remembered we (the Americans mostly) celebrated the time honored tradition of dressing up like the undead or anything occult and parading around with our friends, drinking, stealing candy from children etc. etc. So Halloween is a fairly big deal in the states, especially for most families with young children. In suburbia especially the greater framework for Halloween as we know it exists perfectly, which is to say taking a bunch of kids around from house to house to ring doorbells in search of candy is easy. The suburbs are practically built for it, and the greater part of the population participates with either genuine joy or grumbling acceptance. Oh and it is a HUGE deal for stores like Wal Mart, and here we find the beginnings of the cultural crossover. The big department stores here in Spain, and there are a few but it is nothing like the States, have taken up Halloween as a chance to make profits etc. As  Juan Antonio put it when we asked him, "No es una tradicion tipica. Es comercial."--'It's not a typical (Spanish) tradition, holliday. It's commercial, or it has been commercialized.' Compounding the issue is the lack of houses here in Sevilla--everyone lives in apartment buildings much like any other big city, so the kids who do get dressed up are supposed to go buzzing doorbells and asking to enter the building and then go to the door? I never figured out exactly how they handle this issue, because there certainly were a decent amount of kids dressed in costumes moving around in the evening on Monday. As with anything in Spain though, the real party started after 2 AM. Eddie and I threw together some costumes piecemeal out of the clothing we have and some good 'ol fashioned ingenuity and headed to a friend's apartment to hang out before we headed to a discoteca called Bandalai to dance etc. Everybody else had a pretty fantastic night; I managed to ruin mine pretty well, on account of a mental mistake. I KNEW, i knew i knew they would not let me into the club without pants on. My "costume" required boardshorts and I was smart enough to bring jeans in a stringbag just in case. Instead of putting the jeans on before we got to the door I opted to wait until they kindly shoved me out of line and told me to come back when I had proper attire. Once I did, however, it appeared my window of opportunity had closed. Apparently, the group We Love Spain which operates in Sevilla and dozens of other cities and is the same group who put together our Portugal trip and Eddie's Morocco experience had a limited number of tickets to get people in for the night. I was being allowed in without one of those tickets when I was turned away at the door. When I got back in line and explained what happened to the guy there from We Love Spain he shrugged and said in typical Spanish fashion "Oh, sorry man." Then he and the rest of the group entered with their tickets and I was left to wait in line and seethe. Complication: my phone had a little bit of money left on it but Eddie's was completely out and therefore fairly useless, and so I had lent him my phone for the night because he was going to hang out with some friends from Morocco and needed to be able to communicate with them. Further complication: the price at the door was double what I was going to pay for the ticket. Last straw: I didn't really want to pay to go in and stand around and dance a little bit for the next couple hours. So I left at about 2:50 and called it a night, walked home alone and ate a few bowls of cereal while watching American TV online.

I kicked myself the next day for not sticking it out and experiencing a Spanish Halloween, and then I kicked myself double for worrying about it. There is no such thing as a Spanish Halloween. The Spaniards are simply slowly picking up the tradition, but in reality the only difference between that night and any other is most of them had costumes on. They would still be out at the bars and the clubs until 5 or 6 in the morning partying. I guess what I'm saying is it wasn't particularly special or uniquely Spanish or even European. When I woke up late in the morning (we had a holiday, all Saints day) I felt rested and content, and I had 20 Euros in my wallet which I didn't spend on getting into a club I didn't actually want to be in.

Next week is going to be much more of the same, lots of schoolwork as some term projects and papers and presentations start to become due. Boring, in other words. I'm considering taking a bus to Madrid for the weekend......but even though it's relatively cheap it's 6 hours each way and I have a business project I need to get done. The next weekend is Granada and I don't want to be fretting about doing homework those two days, and then we present the business project the next Thursday which is, yup, Thanksgiving, and then Eddie, Ellie and I get on a plane in the evening and land in Rome about 10 PM. We hadn't realized we scheduled the Rome trip for Thanksgiving weekend until just this week, but then again it's not a Spanish holiday so what's the difference. It will probably just feel a little weird to be traveling but I doubt we'll even notice it.