Last week I decided that I should dress up for Halloween. The last time I dressed up for Halloween I was 9 years old. I was a white ghost and my brother was a masked devil. Anyway, I thought since I'm Japan now I should do something different this year.
So on Thursday I journeyed to Umeda with Morgan, Dan, Sebastian and Jan to search for our costumes for the party on Friday night. We didn't have ideas about specific costumes to buy since we didn't know what kind of costumes would be sold at Loft (it seemed to be the best place to get Halloween costumes).
At Loft there was a little corner on 5/F where all the costumes are kept. There were the typical witches, characters (panda, egg plant or radish?), OL (Office Ladies), flight attendant, schoolgirl uniform, devils, celebrities (Arnold Schwazenegger "the Governator", or - quite unsurprisingly - Michael Jackson, in either dark or fair skin), and Prime Minister Hatoyama.
Jan was desperate to do some shopping since it was the day we got our first scholarship payment, so we were semi-forced to go to Hep Five where we waited for half an hour outside Beams whilst Jan did his shopping. Andrew came to join us for dinner at a しゃぶしゃぶ restaurant above ヨドバシカメラ, where we ate for 2 hours on a ￥2000 食べ放題.
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On Friday morning Fiona, Sebastian and I decided to go to the local recycling centre ("Green Centre") to see if we can get free bikes. We took a bus from 粟生団地 bus terminal and the bus took us into the wild mountains of Minoh... we had no idea where we were when we got off the bus. It turns out the old bikes were all free - we only had to repair them ourselves. Do we look like we 
had any bike repair experience? We didn't know what to do with the bikes, by looking as innocent and confused gaijin we managed to get some help from the local technicians.It took us almost 3 hours to repair the bikes (thus missing the 中級文法 class at 1300), and that was not the end. Since we couldn't get the bikes onto the bus, we had to cycle
down the hill. That already poses as a danger, and then there was the traffic. The journey was horrifying, we had to cycle on steep, meandering slopes alongside huge lorries. I was praying to God the whole time and thought I was about to have a heart attack anytime.When we got to the bottom of the hill it was a pleasant journey, until we got to the university's neighbourhood. The university campus is situated on (yet another) hill, so we had to cycle (or push the bike) uphill...
I was exhausted when I got back to my room; freshened up myself, lied on my bed for about half an hour before getting up again to get dressed for the welcoming party the University organised for all the international students who arrived last month. It was a bit odd as it had already been a month since we arrived at
Osaka, but there was plenty of food and drinks (and alcohol) so we didn't really care. There was a nice range of food: sushi, yaki-soba, canapes, oden, cheese and salami... when we saw the cheese we almost screamed "CHEESE! there's cheese!", it was very exciting 
indeed.It was one party after another. The student-organised Halloween Party at our dormitory started at around 2100 the same evening. It was more fun than other parties we had had in the past few weeks 'cause many people
were in costumes, including the Japanese students.(I must thank Jana for doing my hair. She did some pretty and neat plaids for me to become a "cutie high school girl" - as the costume is called.)
Very exciting it was, to watch everyone's reactions when someone arrives in their costume, and one could hear screeches,
whistling, cheers and applause all around. There was Batman (Dan), Dragonball-Z (Sebastian), a clown (Mark), a ninja (Ivan), Sailor Moon (Dorota), a crab (Reinout), Pikachu (Jan), a pumpkin (Felix), Little Red Riding Hood (Sayaka) and a number of schoolgirls (including Larisa and myself), but the hottest schoolgirl had to be Adam, who wore a brunette 
wig, make-up and the Escada perfume. (I guess he just needed some fake boobs to complete the image!) When Adam got here everyone was screaming with excitement. It was like a celebrity on the red carpet; he loved the attention and was posing for photos as the flashlights sparked continuously at his sailor uniform and perfectly shiny brunette wig.
Andrius had planned to go to Umeda and buy a costume on Friday afternoon but didn't have the
time since we had to go to the welcoming party. At the beginning of the Halloween party he was still wearing his checked jumper and jeans, and then half-way through he reappeared as a Roman! If Adam was hot-sexy, then Andrius was revealing-sexy 'cause he only had a bed sheet covering himself. A bloody ingenious idea though.At around midnight Tanaka-san came down with the security guard to shut the party down. We were furious but didn't dare to say anything. We just moved the party to K-dorm (国際学生宿舎) and continued the party there in the tiny lounge on the ground floor. Not long after that the security guard came in again and told us to go back to our rooms. So we moved to the roof of my dorm, where there were only about 30 of us hanging around there in pitch darkness. We weren't even noisy, just chattering among ourselves, but Tanaka came up again. It was all very frustrating for us - we are university students for f*** sake. And what we didn't understand was that it wasn't the first party we had at the dormitory. There was one the night Rachel and Cayley came - that was the biggest and noisiest party so far, and yet we didn't get shut down that night. Plus we were accused of disturbing the people who lived nearby. Who live near us? We're surrounded by trees and mountains. The only people who lived on campus were the students (both international and local), but everyone was at the party!
Anyway, that was just too surreal - we just couldn't believe what happened. I hadn't had that kind of experience since Mrs. Wooldridge came into Room 23 and told Yan and I that we were singing too loudly in our room, and that was when I was 14 (Year 9).
The party itself was pretty cool though, just a lot of laughter and drinking and chatting. Here are two of my favourite pics of the night (the rest are on facebook) -
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