Halloween

Thanks to its Celtic influences, Galicia takes Halloween pretty seriously. Lugo had a couple of city-wide events, both for children and ahem, us older folks. My school had a Samhain (the name of the Galician holiday, even though Halloween seems to be more colloquial) corner, complete with cut-outs of flying witches and jack-o'lanterns. Most of the kids planned to dress up and go to either parties, or one of the events in Lugo.

Even so, it isn't celebrated to the extent that Halloween is in the US. But my roommate Cindy and I still didn't have any problems finding plenty of festive swag for our living room. Because, of course, we hosted a Halloween party!

the charming hostesses

I had a lot of fun trying to explain my costume to our Spanish guests. (And they were all guys, so of course some of them were like, "But why would you need women in the government?" followed by some type of wink.)

After Halloween came All Saints' Day, which meant that we got Thursday and Friday off of school. We had grand plans of going hiking in a neighboring province, but those were wrecked by an abysmal weather forecast; and then our scaled-down plan to take a day trip to Santiago was nixed by my waking up to a disgusting virus on Friday, which continues to linger. Ugh.

Gwen dressed up as a loba (look for her costume inspiration around 1:54)

In other exciting news, as of Saturday morning, we have Internet at our apartment! We should probably throw another party just 'cause of that.