Halloween!

Halloween!  I have to say, I am satisfied with the quality of festivities that happened in this strange land in honor of our American holiday.  Friday night Mary put together a movie night in the teaching building, so a bunch of us and our students gathered to watch Hocus Pocus, my favorite.  The best part about that was not the movie but listening to the reaction of the Chinese students to the movie.  Chinese folks are the best "oooooh"ers and "aaahhhhh"ers in the world.  It's like they have all predetermined which slapstick humor bits are worthy of laughter, or which surprising parts deserve an audience-wide gasp.  This happens in class too - it's like, as a group, they have learned how to synchronize their audible reactions.  And rather than stifling laughter or hiding surprise, they emphasize these things.  I guess it's good for group bonding to act like that.  I mean I guess it's like those laughter clubs, where people get together and just force laughter until it becomes real laughter.  If you laugh together at something only mildly funny, just hearing everyone else laugh makes it actually funny and then everybody ends up happier. 

Anyway, Saturday night there was a party at the apartment of two of the Austrian exchange students.  They have this apartment in this beauuuuutiful new complex, ten minutes away from campus.  When I walked through the gate I swear I felt like I was in Florida.  (Not that I find Florida particularly beautiful, but in this case the cleanliness and...nice-ness was just so shocking!)  You know, rows and rows of generically-schmancy-looking apartments with ponds with bridges and palm trees and stuff.  So me and Cheikh went dressed as a yin-yang and had a lot of fun at the party, but probably even more fun was the process of getting there and back.  People stare at me when I'm dressed normally - him too, because he's about a foot taller than the average Chinese dude and black.  When we're together, the attention we garner is about twice as much as usual which is overwhelming.  So imagine us dressed like freaks in black and white! Me tottering in heels and him in a crocheted cap!  It was hilarious. 
So the party was your standard drinking-smoking-chatting-college kid Halloween party, except that the guests were from: US, Mexico, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Mauritania, China, and Korea, with about an equal number of languages necessary for all to participate.  It makes me feel like maybe we should add "costume parties" to the list of things everyone in the world can relate to, along with music and touch and things. 
Then last night, on actual Halloween, I went to the Foreign Language Association party, to which I was invited by about five different students and three different emails.  For some reason everything at the party happened in English, although unless I'm mistaken English is not the only foreign language...and the students take Spanish and Korean and German and Arabic in addition to English...I dunno.  Anyway this was a really interesting thing: I got there, with two of my American but Chinese-looking friends, and was immediately swarmed with people ushering me into the room and giving me programs and telling me to eat the snacks and giving me masks and wanting my picture and asking me where I am from and showing me their costumes and wanting me on their team for the such-and-such game.  (This party was in a big event room above one of the dining halls, with a stage in the middle and speakers and lights and so on.  Not an intimate gathering.)  I took about a hundred pictures with Chinese students I don't know and I'm pretty sure the reason was that for the first twenty minutes of the party, I was the only white person in the room.  Have you ever experienced that?!  So weird! But eventually the other Americans showed up and the party started.  First the MCs gave a little introductory speech, then there was a little (hilariously terrible) dance performance, then there was a little Romeo-and-Juliet-meets-Halloween (also quite terrible) drama performance, then Brad, the American teacher who was here last year, gave a little speech about the history of Halloween, and then there was this incredible beat boxer, and then I left partly because I wanted to go to this other talent show thing and partly because I was getting overwhelmed by the amount of people in the room and the strobe lights and the attention.  It was really fun though.  It's like the Halloween party Skidmore has every year, except substitute coke and orange soda for alcohol and weird little candies and lemon-flavored potato chips for pizza,  and with lesser-quality musical/dance performances, and more technical difficulties with the microphones and things.  Hehe.  After I left I went outside to this square where they had a stage set up and there were a lot of people gathered to watch what I think was a talent show.  Not much talent happening at this show, but a lot of happiness.  I think maybe the Chinese aren't as concerned with the quality of things.  As long as the thing is positive, and people are having fun, and nobody is left out, then it is good.  The people singing some sappy love song are not the greatest singers and go out of tune when they try to break into harmony, but the message of the song is cute so it is good.  I could tell that the piano on stage was the one with the broken pedal, which makes it nearly impossible to create a nice sound, but the pianist didn't seem to mind, so it is good.  During the Romeo/Juliet/Halloween play, the microphones kept squealing, so we couldn't really understand the dialogue, but we could tell that the message was nice, so it is good.  My freshman students probably haven't actually learned anything in my class, because nobody is enforcing that I teach them specific things, but the classes are generally enjoyable and positive, so it is good.  I also get the impression that this university is lacking in the feeling of competition between students that exists at American universities.  Like at Skidmore - and Skidmore is not exactly the most cutthroat place in the world - people are constantly trying to get ahead, do more, get better grades, be the president of the most clubs.  Organizations are always trying to improve things, hold meetings, create subcommittees, have discussions on issues.  Whose thesis is going to be the best?  Who is going to win the music department honors awards?  Whose schedule has the most credit hours?  Who will get written up in the newspaper for doing this awesome humanitarian progressive crunchy thing? 
I feel like that kind of thing doesn't happen here, or at least to a much lesser extent.  Nobody cared that every single one of the talent show acts was sort of shitty.  Maybe the whole thing was just for fun anyway, or maybe it is perfectly acceptable to be a shitty performer, or maybe they don't know it was shitty.  I think this is a big difference.