Halloween in Taiwan. You wouldn't think it would be much, but of course we work at an American school, so we like to celebrate those traditional American holidays. The lobby of the school was elaborately decorated for the festivities, thanks to the PTA, who spent a bit of money to hire a crew of professional balloon decorators.

The elementary kids got dressed up in costumes and spent the afternoon playing games and trick-or-treating around the offices and the middle and high school classrooms. My ELL colleague and I decided to skip teaching in the morning and had a little middle school party of our own with our students. We found some mildly terrifying videos to show them, in English, of course. This is ELL class, after all. We also fed them candy and taught them the history of Halloween. Sometimes it's nice to teach outside of the box.

On Saturday we went to the beach. The excuse was to celebrate a friend's birthday but you don't really need an excuse to watch the sunset on the beach on a beautiful Saturday evening. It's starting to get a tiny bit chillier in the evenings but it was very nice to swim in the warm ocean water on the last day of October.

In addition to a lovely sunset there were people nearby setting off fireworks (of course there were, as there are nearly always fireworks going off somewhere) to add a nice touch to our little party.