Happy Halloween?

As you may or may not be aware of, Halloween isn't the biggest holiday in Italy and that was made very evident to me when I saw a grand total of 5 people dressed up on Saturday. However, our group had decided early on that we were going to dress up and celebrate it in a true American fashion. Our program director, Matteo, has 3 young children who have never really celebrated Halloween, so we were going to have them trick-or-treat on our hall floor and we'd give them candy when they knocked on our doors. Afterwards we planned to have a large harvest/apple party during which we would consume many things that would bring up memories of fall at home (ie, apple cider, apple pie, molasses cookies, etc). Our plans were going wonderfully until around 10:15 Saturday morning. 

A group of us were sitting in Megan's room attempting to fix costumes for Sunday evening (the date for the party because it was supposed to be a harvest/halloween/all saints combo party) when Matteo walked in bearing very sad tidings: His middle son, Ronan, was sick with the flu. Not the swine flu, but virus A that at that point had killed 11 people in Italy (I'm pretty sure the number is higher now), so obviously our Halloween trick-or-treating would have to be canceled/postponed. Sad news.

Well, we decided to not let that stop us from still having our harvest party, so we simply moved up the date to that evening. We spent the afternoon attempting to figure our costumes and what exactly we would have to eat at this harvest party. Our group decision was to all dress up and walk to our restaurant together in costume and eat dinner. Yes, we actually planned to go out among the Italians in full-blown American costumes. Needless to say, these costumes had to be good.

At 7:00 most of us made our way out to the hallway ready to walk to dinner. About half of us were dressed up in somewhat generic costumes: hippies, reporters, women as men, vampires, etc... The rest of us decided to dress up as someone else on our trip. So, this may not be quite as exciting for you since you don't actually know these people, but I'm going to tell you about it anyway. Two friends, Carissa and Caitlin, dressed up as the one couple on our trip, Angie and Sergiy. They looked so good!

Another group of us decided to dress up as our director's family. This started when John walked in dressed up as Matteo, the dad, so Jodi became old Matteo based on a picture taken two years ago when he had long hair.

Then we realized that we needed the rest of the family, so Anna became Sherona, the mom,

Erika was Silas, oldest boy, 

Katy was Ronan, middle child, 

and I was Chiara, the almost 2-year old baby 

who does indeed always make that angry face:

We made it to the restaurant without attracting too much attention...or at least as little as we possibly could with 22 people all dressed in variously odd costumes! The restaurant owners loved it, however, and just laughed at us. They were having a concert there that evening at 10:30, so Mauro came over and invited us to it saying: "Yes, yes come to the concert; go back home, change, and then come back to the concert!"