Halloween in Cambodia...what?!

You wouldn't think that halloween was a popular occasion here amongst the monks and the dust but of course us volunteers celebrated in style....Roman style....hello TOGA PARTY. Nina's idea to go for the white bed sheet look and bronze ourselfs up to go for the less scary halloween costume.

It starts on the rooftop, Nina and I in togas made out of white cotton from the market, a ridiculous golden hairband (which we had pulled the bow off) and a pearl necklace from the market. The pearl necklace was a joke, it was obviously the tackiest thing you can see in the market, plastic, broken clasp and scratched plastic beads and the guy tried to claim that they were REAL PEARLS....what a joke....?! 'We live here'is the common phrase when trying to bargaining for things in the market...pretending we know all the prices and we know when they are ripping us off as they do tourists. But this time he was taking us for idiots. Eventually got the 'pearl'necklaces down to a reasonable price to finish off the costume.

Who would have thought that you could dress up here so easily!! The other volunteers looked fantastic, we had a mummy (Sandeep) who came up to the rooftop armed with a white sheet 5 minutes before we were supposed to be leaving and asked for help, Nina wrapped him up and splattered tomato ketchup (from our breakfast) over him. We had a very scary gothic style Sanna and met the others who were bumble bees, fairies, German tourists (sandles and socks, LP in hand, ridiculous hat, belly and bumbag...you can just imagine!) red indians...etc.

We left the apartments and the attention starts, the little kiddies and the lady in the wooden stall next to our apartments LOVED our costumes. The lady was stopping moto drivers and pushing them towards Sanna to see her face painted face. Sandeep came down mummy style with arms out straight and scared the life out of the children! They will have had no idea what we were doing going out like this as they obviously don't know about halloween here but they loved it all the same. We got out of the tuk tuk in pub street (yes i know, pub street) and heads were turning, I felt like a celeb...tourists were taking photos. A few Koreans came and had photos with us so i thought why not, I'll take one with my camera too as it was a rather strange moment!

Many ex pats and other volunteers had come in fancy dress so we did a little parade around the street which the Khmer people loved and ended up dancing on the tables in Ankor What? bar.... At around 3am Nina suggests a pool partay. Yes nickered - from a TOGAAAA PARTY to a POOL PARTAAAAY. Anyhoo, luckily bikini under toga was a good look and ended the night dancing with my broken toga as when I got to the pool I was so very excited to get in it that I had to physically rip my toga including the VERY expensive 'pearls' off me...