Celebrating Halloween in Asia

Halloween in Asia does not even vaguely resemble it's origins in the West. I've only found one fancy dress shop in the whole of Kota Kinabalu (a decent sized city) where you can buy outfits, but for some reason it's all in pre-teen sizes. Asian pre-teen sizes - that's pretty small. Deciding we would have to celebrate this annual excuse for mugging strangers for chocolate in other ways, we bought a pumpkin.

A previous pumpkin

Can I just mention that my pumpkin carving skills are pretty damn good. I mean I've done some fairly intricate vegetable carving work before. Because it turns out those brightly coloured (do they inject E-numbers at birth?) supermarket pumpkins are bred for you to decapitate with a sharp knife. The pumpkin I found was not so well genetically modified - it had walls three inches thick! Which meant cutting it was really hard. Which meant that the elaborate fanged mouth I would normally do was going to be really tricky. I suspect the reason it was such a fleshy vegetable is because no Asian person in their right mind would waste a whole meal for their family of 12 on a goopy mess that's going to be covered in bugs approximately five seconds after you put it outside - so pumpkins here are actually for eating.

A prunken Drumpkin

Also, this dock I'm on right now has at least THREE kids on it and none of them have been trick-or-treating; they're probably inside killing old grannies on the streets of GTA, or whatever it is kids are playing these days.

Despite the lack of children dressed in scary masks based on cartoons that I'm too old to recognize, there are benefits to Halloween in Asia. Here are some of them: 


Today the weather was 30-something degrees.
Right now it's around 26.
I haven't seen a drop of rain, or a cloud in the sky.
I went diving this morning at around 10am wearing a thin dive skin.
...I went diving.
No one here has any idea what a good pumpkin should look like, so they think mine's great!
If none of the kids gets their act together and realize they can come and beg for candy, I get to eat all of it myself. Mwa-ha-HA-haaaaaaaaa

Also the nightlife is probably the sole exception to people who don't care about our pagan festival - most clubs have a prize for the best costume on the night. Hopefully we'll have a good chance of winning, as we've had a lot more experience creating fancy dress from scratch than I think they have!