Halloween in the Land of Snow

Halloween comes but once a year and this year's was a memorable one. Trying to put on a Halloween party outside of the States is a challenge within itself but trying to put one on in Lhasa was a different kind of challenge. In many places the concept of Halloween itself is unfamiliar, not just the implementation or adoption. However, in Lhasa Halloween in its entirety ( candy, costume, trick or treating, dress up party) is almost unknown to locals. So, some fellow students and I took it upon ourselves to not let this year's Halloween pass without putting up a glorious fight ( in the form of a party). We encouraged all guests and fellow foreign students to dress up. And in order to have a comparable Halloween party to one we might have at home, we provided refreshments and snacks in the haunted common room on the third floor.
The refreshments turned out to be quite well done. We bought homemade potato chips from a little stand right outside of campus, mandarin oranges (because they are the closest thing that look like pumpkins here), popcorn, apple wafer candies (to give out to guests as trick or treat candy), and all types of beverages. We got both kinds of local beer here ("Lhasa Beer"), Chang or Barely Beer and fruit juice. There was also your hodgepodge supply of chocolate and chocolate bars from all over the world, like Toblerone, Kit Kat and Japanese mochi.
Now once the party started things were a little shaky. No one was dancing and our guests were genuinely confused as to what was going on with all the costumes and the concept of Halloween itself. After we explained that it was a custom in our country to dress up and go trick or treating (still maybe too strange) while also putting on dance parties for Halloween was very common. When the music kicked in and started being a better assortment for dancing, that is when things started warming up.
On the dance floor our guests started to make Halloween their own. It got really exciting when they started doing popular Tibetan steps to American popular music hits, like to songs by Lady Gaga and Brittney Spears. This was very cool to see. Free style dance was basically new and unfamiliar to the Tibetan and Chinese guests. It wasn't that they were bad dancers at all, it was just difficult for them to dance freely and not have a commonly known choreographed dance to draw on. At first the free style dancing produced many strange looks. Especially as I danced and pranced as Peter Pan, performing multiple mock duets with various costume props. I would periodically switch off between my bubble sword (it could blow bubbles), light saber, and pumpkin looking swash (the only one in Lhasa) as my partners. As you can gather I am a pretty silly dancer when it comes to costume parties. I also had my share of duets with real people too including some of our guests and pushed for spontaneous soul train dance lines. Each of my partners were really surprised when I started to dance with them. In Tibetan traditional and popular dances the men and women don't necessarily touch each other very much but do line dancing style formations and steps. This means they either dance in unison or dance complimentary to each other not usually hand and hand. Dancing directly with a partner is not very common. In traditional and popular Tibetan dance styles men and women usually do their own gender specific version of the dance and hardly ever do a touching collaborative style dance like what westerners would be used to (like what one would find in western waltz style dancing).
When the party finally wrapped up everyone had a wonderful time and there was way too much food and drinks left over. Our guests were so happy to have been invited and definitely less shocked by our costume revelry as they made their way back to their own dorms in the late Halloween night. Although there wasn't many costumed guests (there was one masked guest or a guest who brought a mask) I think Halloween provided an opportunity to share some of our American culture in a relaxed and amusing environment. Maybe next year there will be a Halloween party in one of the other dorms on campus, westerns not necessarily included.