Cali-Parisien

Fête de Halloween

We were missing home so we got together some of our friends for a Halloween party. I've heard that Halloween was very popular here a few years ago, but since then it's becoming less and less widespread. The kids though still haven't given up on it, and we even saw a few running around in costumes during the week looking for candy. I guess candy is a good motivator in any country.

The biggest challenge was finding the pumpkins. As you know, most people here that live in the city of Paris don't have cars so the few pumpkins that we saw in the markets were pretty small or cut in slices. Not really suitable for carving, even if they knew of doing such implausible things. They really just make soup and cook with them here.

So after searching for a few weeks, we finally got a tip from a friend back home that found a farm just outside of Paris that was selling pumpkins (big ones even)! So Shanta went one day to go investigate and bring back the pumpkins. We wanted to get enough that everyone at our Halloween party could have some fun carving, so we decided to buy seven.

You can imagine the next challenge was getting seven pumpkins home from a farm pretty much in the middle of no-where to our apartment back in Paris proper. We had called a taxi company ahead of time and planned for her to return by taxi, but that proved to be difficult. After driving (like a crazy taxi driver) for a few blocks the driver got fed-up (the pumpkins were knocking around too much in the trunk), refusing to go any farther and turned around, tossing her and the pumpkins out at the farm again where she started.

Luckily one of the nice farm-workers offered to give Shanta and the pumpkins a ride back to my work, which was on the way as it is in a suburb just outside of Paris. And then the two of us struggled on the train and metro (during rush hour) carrying them back. You can imagine the strange stares we got everywhere we went.

It's funny that we do these crazy things to hold on to a piece of comfort that we know from back home. I don't think we are ready to try this with seven turkeys for Thanksgiving, though.

posted by geek @ mardi, novembre 01, 2005 0 comments