On Thursday 28^th of October, 3 days before Halloween, we had a Pumpkin Carving contest at the Painted Turtle Guesthouse, fancy dress welcome! For this occassion, Kat and I decorated the whole guesthouse with spider’s webs, spooky ghosts and skulls.

Everybody (staff, guests and others) brought their own pumpkin and some dishes of food to share after the competition. In Germany pumpkin carving is not that common, as a result I was quite inexperienced. (I have to admit that I googled pumpkin carving patterns in order to be prepared!)

Kat and me planned to bring homemade pumpkin soup. Neither of us had done it before so it was a kind of adventure. We cut the carrots, potatoes and the pumpkin and after a while of cooking, the broth started to look like soup.

At 7pm the guests and staff started to carve their pumpkins and finally a huge amount of grimaces was staring at us: a mummy, a screaming face, a pumpkin eating another one and many more. Afterwards we put small candles in them. It looked awesome! All the faces began to become almost alive.

Quickly, we turned our attention to the rich diversity of dishes everybody had brought. We had Nachos with different types of dips and sausage rolls as appetizers (but in fact those were already eaten during the “exhausting” pumpkin carving).

As main dish we could choose between our delicious pumpkin soup, fresh vegetables, Asian chicken salad, roast chicken and steak. Everything was very tasty, but my favourite was the Asian chicken salad! I should definitely get one of these pants that grow with your belly…

Soon the dessert followed: fruit salad, cupcakes, different types of fancy cakes and the typical trick-or-treat-sweets. After this amazing dinner I felt as if I couldn’t walk anymore.

But Halloween just started! On Saturday there was a great trick-or-treat downtown which was called “Hoot and Howl”. Everybody was on the streets, especially children. All the shops distributed candy and I was kind of jealous because I was too grown up to walk from house to house to ask for sweets. We saw little unicorns, witches, batmen, supermarios, lions as well as princesses, police officers and fairies. At least I could have pretended not to know that this fun was reserved for children only! I mean I am German…

All the houses were decorated with spider webs, skulls and pumpkins but we thought the evening of the actual day of Halloween, Sunday, would be the best time to make some photos!

We were wrong! As we went for a little walk the next day in order to see the decoration being lit up it seemed like the spirit of Halloween was already gone! Houses that had been richly embellished with pumpkin-shaved chains of light now were dark. Very disappointing!

But nevertheless, Halloween in Canada was a great experience (also because of the many fun Halloween-parties we went to!).