Halloween Halfheartedly

Not much to report this week, it was pretty blah because I spent much of it enduring a nasty cold (I think it was worse than normal because it’s the southern hemisphere – new germs). I went to a couple of job interviews, but canceled one of them because I was sick, and I don’t think I’m going to do it anyway (it was giving free energy-saving lights to hotels, which sounds easy, except that it was only by commission and there wasn’t a list telling you which hotels to go to, so it sounded like it might be lots of wandering around for little gain). The other interview I faked really well considering I was sick and that it was a phone fundraising thing for charities (which I don’t know if I could do as a full-time job). They invited me back for a “final assessment,” which is conveniently in between the hours of this flyering job I got just for next week (handing out flyers at train stations and hostels advertising this Adventure Travel Expo thing on the weekend, which is a nice gig and should be fun). So that’s the job update in a nutshell, onto more interesting things…like this confusing view of Sydney from the 22^nd floor of one of the interview places. The bit on the left is the normal view out the window, the bit on the right is the reflection of what’s further to the left but out of the shot. I’ll put the normal view at the bottom of this post so you can see it clearly.

Halloween was distinctly depressing, which was too bad considering the last time I was in Australia for Halloween the whole study-abroad group dressed up and crashed a local pub and had a great time. I got a hostel in King’s Cross for the night, which is supposed to be pretty social, and I’d heard about this art party thing happening at one of the hotels (aka bars). I didn’t really have a costume, but I decided I would be a rainbow lorikeet, in the abstract sense, and I bought a wig to go with my colour scheme, and used my towel as wings. Sadly, I didn’t interact with anyone really to show them what my costume was, but this is what it looked like (the wig was kind of fun).
 

The party was funky. There were 5 floors and with live fashion shoots of models happening on most of them. One floor had girls in cowgirl attire posing in front of a “Western” backdrop, another had some people in grungy weird outfits posing on pedestals in front of a grungy backdrop (I didn’t get the point of that one), and a third floor had actual Halloweeny things going on – a group of three witches by a cauldron with some eerie green lighting, a Dracula lounging on armchair behind a coffin, and a creepy-looking skinny girl sitting in a lab chair with Frankenstein makeup. The last fashion floor had girls in sort of doll outfits, one was like a cat-doll, another was like a black and white striped harlequin doll. The coolest was this girl under an umbrella that had fine threads hanging down that looked like it was raining all around her (I don’t remember what she was wearing though).

I should have brought my camera, because there were tons of people taking pictures (like real photographers with fancy lenses and annoyingly bright flashbulbs) and there was also a contest for the best photo taken. You could pose with Dracula and then enter a contest for the best costume (I took a picture for some girls who posed). The party was kind of a weird mix of models, photographers, and costumed guests, and even though I found the girls who’d told me about the party, the band was really loud at that point (there was live music on a few floors) so I didn’t talk to them for that long and I didn’t really meet anyone else.

Meanwhile, the hostel was taking people out to a Halloween pub crawl, and I was planning on going, but by the time I got back from the other party I was really feeling crappy, and I didn’t know anyone at the hostel to go with (that was my mistake, I should have gone there a day early or something to get to meet people, or just stayed in my original hostel) so I just watched part of a movie and went to bed. Super lame, but the bed was really comfy, and I ended up staying there another night just because I needed the extra rest time.

Anyway, that’s the second lame Halloween in a row for me, after I missed all the parties at Stanford last year due to an unexpected 24-hour layover in Costa Rica, so here’s hoping that next years will break the curse and be more fun!