Verbal Snippets & Snapshots

To continue my recurring theme of creating and eating food this year, I ended an especially hectic week last night by celebrating Halloween with some of my friends and some members of the Filipino Students Association in an informal social event we called “Halo-Halo Halloween!” (Earlier this month, we had another food-related event with a quirky title called “Karaoke-Karioka!”) With this event, we created the Filipino dessert called halo-halo (whose literal translation from Tagalog is “mix-mix”), which consists of shaved ice topped with evaporated milk and a variety of mixed beans and tropical fruits (such as jackfruit, young coconut, and red beans) and other sweets (such as flan or ice cream) as toppings. We also ordered some Chinese take-out food as our dinner–and so we spent the evening eating away and talking with each other for a few hours. It was like a casual extended-family dinner–delicious and relaxing at the same time! Originally, we also were planning on watching scary movies or wearing costumes to follow through with the Halloween theme, but we ended up doing neither.

As you probably know, there are still a few days before Halloween, and so I still have some time to celebrate this mischievously fun holiday this year. I’ve always enjoyed Halloween–I enjoyed trick-or-treating as a child, and I’ve always enjoyed dressing up in costume. Since Halloween will be on a Friday this year, I’ll definitely celebrate it on the actual holiday itself! I’m excited over that prospect. In my freshman year, I did a Halloween activity with my tutee from the JHU Tutorial Project a the day before Halloween, and I wore a costume while going to Culture Show dance practices and doing homework in my dorm on the day of Halloween itself. Last year, I did nothing special on the day of Halloween itself; all I did to mark the holiday was spend about two hours at a Halloween costume party the previous weekend.

Anyway, so far, I plan to spend some time on the night of Halloween reuniting with a few of my freshman year housemates at a quiet little costume party; afterwards, I’ll reunite with some recent alumni friends of mine to go to Fell’s Point. Every year, revelers gather at this Baltimore neighborhood dressed in costume on the night of Halloween. I didn’t go there on Halloween when I was a freshman because I was too scared! Meanwhile, I didn’t go there on Halloween last year because I was too tired (and I had too much homework to complete for the next day). I’ll admit that while I’m excited to dress up in costume and check out Fell’s Point with a group of friends this year, I’m still a little scared of what I might encounter when I go there. I think part of this fear stems from the fact that this will be my first time going there. I definitely follow some advice of a male friend of mine who’s been to Fell’s Point on the night of Halloween before and walk through the neighborhood in groups that have at least one guy present–I should be fine otherwise.

With that said, I’ll return to my homework, and the next time I’ll post, I’ll let you know how Halloween went!

Photo Captions: (1) some halo-halo toppings in a bowl (2) some more halo-halo toppings in another bowl (in front of a few cans of jackfruit from Thailand and a can of evaporated milk) (3) some FSA members enjoying halo-halo and waiting for Chinese take-out food to be delivered to my apartment