RatSoap

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Halloween

When we were walking to the park, there was some noise coming from the Military School. The gates were open, so we went in to see. It was an equestrian competition.

Mom says it's called steeplechase. There were people sitting on bleachers and, on the grass field, there were riders on some very beautiful horses jumping over the hurdles.

Here is a short video of it:

The riders had nice outfits on and were holding a whip in their hand. One contestant had to use the whip because her horse went to the side when it was supposed to jump.

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I didn't know that they celebrated Halloween in Chile. I thought it was only an American celebration.

But when I looked it up on the Internet, it said that Halloween isn't from the U.S.A. It actually came from Ireland, and the Irish took it to America when more than one million people moved from there to the United States in the 1840s, escaping starvation.

Halloween started as a party of the dead, where people sacrificed animals to the spirits because they were scared of them. They also dressed up in costumes so that the spirits wouldn't recognize them.

Well, they now celebrate Halloween in Chile, too, and my friends invited me to a sleep-over on October 31st. I went with my costume already on:

I was the French mime Marcel Marceau, who died a few weeks ago.

It was strange, because when you paint your face this way, you ALWAYS look sad unless you smile. Before we went trick-or-treating, we played some soccer in our costumes, and my friend told me, when my team was loosing, "Don't look so sad!"

My friends liked my costume. Others dressed up like vampires. One friend had scars on her face and a knife going through her head, until a mother of two small children asked her to take the knife off because it was scaring the toddlers.

In our group, we also had a widow, a witch, another witch, and a few devils. When we went trick-or-treating, one lady asked us to do something before she gave us candy, so I did a mime act, and we all sang a song.

When we finally went to bed that night (past midnight), we counted our candies. I had 174, but most of them were small suckers. Then we watched "Scary Movie 3," which I didn't want to see. My friends had the volume blaring, and the movie was in English, so I could understand everything (tons of bad words).

It was VERY violent and scary (for me), and I had to close my eyes and ask my friends to turn the volume down. Everyone else said that the movie was supposed to be a comedy, but I had never seen it, so it scared me.

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RJE also went trick-or-treating with one of her friends. She dressed up as a tiger, and she and her friend went to every single apartment in three huge buildings. She was starving because she didn't have dinner before going, so she ate a bowl full of candy instead.

When she got home, she said she wasn't going to eat candy for a whole month, and that she was very tired and going to bed.

The next morning, we caught RJE eating chocolate chips and candy on the balcony. Now, the "sugar queen" is not allowed to touch any kind of sweet for a month.

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After Halloween, we got Thursday and Friday off because it was All Saints Day, November 1st. To celebrate All Saints, everyone goes to the cemetery---so there were lots of traffic jams and lots of people buying flowers that day.

The metro station at the entrance to the main cementary in Santiago (the one we visited months ago) was so crowded, that they had to shut it down.

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I took a test in English class and one of the questions was "What is the superlative form of modern?" I wasn't sure, so I figured that since "modern" has only two syllables, according to the rule, the answer had to be "modernest."

It sounded right to me, so I just put that. But when I got home, Mom and Dad said, "Noooo!" That it was "most modern," because the rule is "if the adjective is TWO syllables or more, and does not end in Y."

This is the first test in English that I get lower that 100%! The teacher still hasn't given back the tests, but I will be very embarrassed when she hands me mine.

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Since our last RatSoap contest went so well, Dad got an idea for a new one.

This is a picture of some bread they sell here that is called "Marraqueta":

The five loaves cost us 292 pesos (about 60 cents of a dollar).

If you want to participate in this contest, you have to guess how much the five loaves weighed, in pounds. (Hint: the right answer is somewhere between 0.00 pounds and 0.99 pounds.)

Again, you can use a nickname if you don't want your real name to appear on the list of guesses:

*** contest closed *** See results in next post.

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