A Very American Halloween

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Good afternoon one and all!!

I have survived another week in the thick of Mouse-land - and today is a month to the day that I have been here!! It's gone really fast, only 5 more to go...

This week has been particularly tiring due to a combination of finishing training at work and that most commerical of American holidays....Halloween!! As you can imagine, the combination of Halloween and Walt Disney World has the sound of tills ringing in many people's mind, which is very true, but it was also a huge amount of fun being in the hotel and seeing all the little kids dressed up beyond all recognition in a variety of amazing outfits!!

I went to two Halloween parties this week - one at Building 30 and one at my old housemate Pat's place over the road at Sabal Palm. Normally I am extremely anti-Halloween as a pile of commerical bobbins, but I decided to get into the spirit as I am in the United States. So I went to Claire's Accessories and bought lots of neon stuff to dress up as an 80s Gogo dancer!! I have to say, I had a huge amount of fun, in particular laughing at everyone else's costumes. Pat's party was especially good as lots of people from work went (Pat quit the Front Desk at the Grand Floridian the same day I started) as well as my other former housemate Jim, so we had a mini-reunion which was brilliant.

Last week was also my first shift since I finished training and it didn't all go exactly according to plan!! Having worked days all through training I was immediately stuck on what I have labelled 'the shift of death' - 6pm - 230am. Without going into extremely boring detail the later hours of the shift bear absolutely no resemblance to what I have been trained to do, and in addition everything just went horribly wrong, so I wasn't in a particularly good mood when the bus eventually picked me up 40 minutes late at 310am.

But on the plus side, I had Friday off - I'd love to tell you what I did but I actually can't remember, so it can't have been anything interesting!! Yesterday was class yet again, then I went to Universal Studios with my flatmate Lorena and some others to check out the last Halloween Horror Nights of the year. Universal's take on Halloween is the polar opposite - predictably - of Disney's: instead of being all happy smiley, it largely involves scaring you to within an inch of your life through the 7 or 8 different haunted houses that are set up around the park, each one based on a different horror movie. You aren't allowed to dress up, because the 'scarers' from Universal are allowed to get as close to you as they like but they can't touch you, so the no costumes rule ensures that you know the people in costume are legit. All the lights are dimmed and they pump gallons of smoke machine smoke into the park to make it all misty...all in all it was very scary, very funny, and I had a really good time!!

Today I'm working another late shift - 430pm - 1am. But tomorrow I am hopefully meeting up with another former housemate Nicole to go and play in the parks, so I have that to look forward to after work tomorrow!

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Photos

Old Housemates reunited again
Building 11 forever!!