Serbian Style Halloween

I have always been a big Halloween fan.  Between the candy and the costumes, how can you not love it?  Every year that I lived in DC, I either went to a party or just paraded the streets of Adams Morgan looking for the funniest/most original costumes. In Belgrade, the North American expats have made sure to bring Halloween and its spirit to whoever chooses to join in the festivities.  Last year, since we were newly arrived, we ventured to both the Marine House party and the Canadian Club parties costume-less and unaccompanied.  Both parties were pretty fun, considering we didn't know anyone there and they actually proved to be the catalyst in making what would later be our best friends in BEG.   This year, we were ready to rock the house with our well-planned out, 5 Euro a pop, home made with Chinese Market materials group costumes.  Our great friend K. (also known as 'Martha') was the brain behind the 'Fun and Inappropriate Costumes' Operation.   Since we had two events back to back, we decided to each have two costumes.   For the Canadian Club, we opted for the more generic one: Angry Birds.  Using trash and recyclig bags, some huge pieces of paper fabric and shower curtains, we each got to be a different color bird.  Except me.  I go to be the pig.  King pig to be exact.  I had the most bootleg, but funniest costume of the six.  K. made me a crown to wear, along with my green pig ears.  All pics courtesy of C.  who should really consider joining some sort of Serbian paparazzi group.

The birds stomping on the pig

For the second costume, we had first come up with the idea of being scrabble boards for the facebook game 'words with friends'. Later, we thought, "what if we are just words...and then, all together, 'with friends'?"  So we picked some good word combinations for ourselves; appropriate and professional alone, not so much when together.  We had a lot of fun posing for pics and arranging/re-arranging our positions to come up with some other good phrases. Again, Martha went all out and made us the most beautiful, perfectly lined up tiles for our words.  Literally. Just four days earlier, we all went to her house to find that she had already pre-cut the poster board in perfect equal squares, rounded the corners, printed out the individual letters, cut them to perfection, and glued them to the board.   In order to finish all the costumes in time, she re-arranged the living room as her own personal sweatshop and divided us into two groups.  As Martha has never been a teacher, she didn't realize that grouping by ability is perhaps not the best idea; so she set 'us', the least capable ones, working on the menial tasks of marking places to make holes, hole punch, tape and assemble tiles and 'them', the smart ones, to work on the finishing touches for Angry Birds.  Needless to say, Phil became the model, 4.0 student all over again and half hour later he was allowed to work alone on his own bird.  Me? I was still struggling on figuring out if the ruler was upside down as I marked where the holes would go.

Front

Back

Combos

So overall, costumes were a huge success, and the parties were really fun.  But the real highlight of the night was that I met a reader who is not already one of my friends!  I was walking around as the 'king pig' and someone dressed as a Mexican came up to me and straight out asked if I had a blog and if it was Flippin' Serbia.  It made my night!   So, if you are reading still, let's get together and hang out!