A Swiss Halloween

Saturday night I went out with a group of friends for Halloween. I had been told from the beginning that Halloween is only in the past five years or so starting to catch on a little bit in Geneva. I think the only people who have really started to follow the American tradition are the ones looking for an excuse to have a party.

The night started off at a little bar. I decided to quasi-dress up, and I wore a nice shirt and tie, black dress pants and dress shoes. I said I was employed and had a lot of money. However, nobody really got the joke; the Swiss did not seem to understand that costumes can be a joke instead of being something scary or typically Halloween.

I did not see many people wearing costumes, but the costumes that I did see were witches, devils and black cats. While there is nothing wrong with these costumes, I guess the idea of costume originality has not really caught on yet here. I mean honestly, how original is it to dress up as a witch for Halloween?

I was reminded of the movie Mean Girls. Ya, I said it, I have seen Mean Girls. And it was surprisingly funny. The part wear Lindsey Lohan's character, a teenage girl from South Africa who recently moved to America, goes to the high school Halloween party. Instead of dressing up like a prostitute as most teenage girls do these days, she dressed up like the Bride of Frankenstein. I guess it is a purely American tradition for girls to dress up as street walkers for Halloween. Still, maybe the holiday would catch on a little bit more over here if European girls did decide to conform to the American trend.

We ended up going to a pretty alternative club later that night. By alternative, I mean people dress pretty grungy, the building is old and run down, the walls are covered with graffiti, and the music is of the house-techno genre. I can handle the techno music every now and again if I am out at a club. Needless to say, I really did not fit in with my costume. If I go to this club again, I will pass on the GQ look and stick to dirty old converses and jeans with holes in them.

I saw a few people who I could have sworn were dressed up for Halloween at first glance. After studying the situation a little more closely, I realized that they were just your garden-type gothic youths. All black clothes, big black boots, chains on their clothes, spiked hair, pale skin, dark make-up around their eyes, you get the point. I wondered why I was shocked, and then I remembered that I have lived in Miami and sunny southern Spain the last four years. In these places, there are not a lot of gothic people. They prefer to avoid the sunniest places on the planet and stick to cold, darker areas where they will not die of heatstroke when wearing their big black boots and trench coats.