It must be Halloween. There are bodies everywhere.

No, really, there are.  Well, all over my sketchbook, anyway.  We were taking turns doing 1 and 3 minute poses to practice figure drawings in our drawing class.  A few notes from that: First off, guys aren't the only ones who randomly start strength competitions if given the chance.  Second, if someone does something cool in the beginning, they're hard to beat.  Third, if you decide during the beginning of one of these kinds of things to show off and hold a rather difficult position for one and/or for three minutes, don't be surprised when your legs protest when you stand up.  (Fourth, just don't do that.  It's silly.)

That was the morning, then, and it filled up my sketchbook.  But we're interested in Halloween here, so we now move on.

I went out to Camden Market and I'm beginning to think that half of London is either open-air market or park, but anyway my friends were looking for costume supplies.  I was ready to pick up something if it was small and cheap and could be easily modified into a good costume but the only things I saw that I wanted were awesome looking coats and top hats, the latter of which I'd have trouble getting home and the former were rather pricey.  So I didn't get anything and ended up at the last moment putting on a skirt, throwing a scarf around my waist, my shoulder, and my head, asking a friend to curl my hair, borrowing some bright eyeshadow, and calling myself a gypsy.  There were some pretty awesome costumes--we had TMNTs, some of the English students dressed as artists with berets and painted-up shirts that said "What is Art?" on the back to mock in homage to Heiddeger or however you spell his name, John Bennion and his son dressed as each other which was utterly hilarious, there was a pirate, a chimney sweep, a few bobbies, a wolf, a cartoon character a la Lichtenstein...lots of others, you get the idea.  Pretty clever stuff, too.

So, party--Thais had made some awesome cream-cheese-and-shrimp stuff baked into pumpkins which you ate with the pumpkin flesh on rice and it was delicious, and there was candy and light-up table decor and much rejoicing.  We followed this up with sugar-cookie decorating and consumption, and then a dance party in the classroom which was highly entertaining and quite fun (We'd had a party earlier for one of the days when two of the girls had birthdays on the same day and I somehow managed over the course of these two dance parties to convince some of the girls here that I'm an awesome dancer in the freestyle not-ballroom method.  My doing the worm during the first party may have had something to do with that.)  All in all, great night.  And on Saturday after a failed attempt to go on the Harry Potter tour which we were late for and found out it wasn't free after all anyway and a sketchbook excursion which led to more wandering around London down in the Kensington area, we watched Nightmare Before Christmas on Saturday evening.  Happy Halloween and hauntings and spookiness, all.