Halloween in Granada!

So they really celebrate Halloween here, it was very impressive! I feel like they actually dress up and celebrate a purer Halloween than we do at home. At home in the US, Halloween has turned into an excuse for college students to dress up, or shall we say dress down, and party. Girls find ways to show as much skin as possible. But here, they actually wear costumes that are scary! Almost everyone had crazy facepaint involving some bloody disguise, gross and way more pure in the scary Halloween spirit than the slutty excuse it's become in the US. You could tell people put a lot of time into their costumes, with detailed face paint, homemade costumes and accesories...good stuff! And a lot of my friends traveled around Europe this weekend, and they all agreed that none of the cities they went to (Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin..) even came close to Granada in terms of Halloween spirit! :)

On Friday night I dressed up with friends and took a bus to a club outside of the city. I had figured out my costume about an hour before, by going into a chino store (kind of like a second hand store I guess...) and finding some sweet snakeskin pants and a hat, so I was Indiana Jones. Garren was a pretty legit pirate, and Alan found a cow hat and proceeded to make his own cow suit that was awesome! Haha. We got on the bus at about 2 am, and it took us to this club about 30 minutes outside of the city, called Embrujo ("Bewtiched"). Perfect. It was so awesome! It was this huge castle! Really, it's hard to explain and unfortunately there are no pictures. Here's a link to the club's site which would be fun to look at:

http://www.embrujocopas.com/Default.aspx

Not sure if that link will work. Anyway, it was this cool castle place, complete with a tall tower, and turrets lining the rooftops, cool Andalucian architecture style buildings... On the way in we walked through this small haunted house which was fairly scary. Alan freaked out when this creepy, bloody costumed man ran after us with a running saw....ok that scared me a bit too. :) The main room was packed with people, and great decorations and thick dry ice smoke for a nice effect.

A couple hours in, Alan and I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, and I ended up leading the way climbing over a metal gate away from all the other people outside. We walked into the darkness, and I found a staircase leading into the dark. We explored all around this pitch black, huge deserted room. There were big tables and chairs and it seemed like a big area for conventions and catering or something...We ended up finding a way onto the roof, and there we stargazed. Gorgeous view of the lights of Granada as well. From the roof, surrounded by turrets in this weird castle place, we watched the bright orange Halloween moon SET at 5:03 am. So awesome! We explored around the roof some more, and walked along these awesome bridges that connected the different rooves. The bridges were about 35 feet up, and they were made of metal grating so you could see through the bridge below your feet. So cool and dangerous! We eventually were found by a zombie (security guard I presume, dressed up :) ), who chased us out of the deserted world we'd found and pushed us back into the crowded and loud dance floor building. So that was a fun place. The whole thing seems like a weird, medieval dream.