Halloween Part Two, the Nagoya Extravaganza

For our group Halloween party, we decided to go to Nagoya.  We dressed up and headed to a soba restaurant, which ended up being extremely traditional and as such not amenable to doing something gluten-free past plain 100% buckwheat soba and tofu with salt.  The cook actually told me that if he made vegetables without panko (bread crumbs), they wouldn't be delicious, so he wouldn't make them for me.  I was halfway through the food they would bring me when the irony hit me: salt tofu and plain soba was definitely much more delicious without non-breaded veggies than it would have been with said veggies.  Oh well, I'll just stick to making my own soba from now on.  The party was still great fun!

Matt went as Harry Potter, which you can see close-up to the left.  He dressed up for school on Monday, too, and his kids went nuts for the costume.  My costume requires a bit more explanation: I dressed as the titular role from the ballet Giselle.  In the ballet, she's a poor woman who meets a prince dressed as a pauper and falls in love with him.  He then goes back to the palace to marry a princess, and Giselle is heartbroken to discover the truth.  She kills herself and that's the end of the first act.  In the second act, she is brought back as a spirit who must dance men to death each night in the forest as part of a group of similarly scorned women.  The prince returns in order to prove his love, but finds her dead.  She refuses to dance him to death and saves his life.  I wore little angel wings and a long tutu dress reminiscent of the romantic length tutus worn in the ballet.  Despite my best efforts, of course everyone thought I was an angel.

Our friends Audrey and Martin dressed as Mormon missionaries.  They made an amazing pair, complete with name badges (with fake names) and The Book of Mormon.  Below you can see Harry Potter take them on with his magic wand.  

  

Another of the funniest moments of the picture portion of the evening was when our friend Stephen sneaked behind Mari and I snapped the picture to the right.  I still can't believe I actually got the shot.  Throughout the evening, if we lost sight of Stephen, eventually we found him skulking behind a person or a sign, cultivating the creepy serial killer persona. 

Most of our group is pictured to the left: from L-R, standing, is Rachael as a goddess, Audrey and Martin the Mormons, Matt, Saya, Mari the cat, and me.  From L-R kneeling is Asuko, a friend of Rachael's, Kazune the first pumpkin, Stephen the serial killer, and Chiko the second pumpkin.  Admittedly the westerners got a bit more into the costume development.

We went bowling in the costumes after dinner, which was a fun treat.  Unlike the restaurant, who said they didn't want us to wear costumes (because it might upset their clientele), the bowling alley had no such reservations.  In fact, they had costumes there for people to rent and wear just for bowling.  We saw one guy in an undersized cheerleader's uniform, which was awesome.  Only in Japan, right?  Well, maybe Korea too.  Anyway, we shared Halloween candy and had fun being terrible bowlers together.  My bowling ball had a penguin on it!  The cuteness of the penguin helped me forget about all the gutter balls I rolled with it.  All in all, it was a pretty good Halloween, with just enough magic and mischief to be fun, not enough to be scary!