Halloween comes early

This is a particularly long post, for which I apologize in advance, but I promise that it’s (most likely) worth it! Spoiler alert: it involves a haunted house.

The weather finally got a bit cooler here thanks to a healthy amount of rain. I decided to take advantage of this and wander to a park I had passed a few days ago on my way home from the supermarket. It had looked like a beacon of tranquility in a dusty and noisy city.

I knew immediately when I walked in I was going to love it there. There were several middle-aged women practicing tai chi, an older man dancing with a sword, and several little children getting martial arts lessons all within the first one hundred feet. Cliched, maybe, but this was the China I had been imagining. This park is not so much a sprawling Grant Park, but more of a forested recreational area built all over the side of a steep hill. I decided to venture up a set of stairs that disappeared upwards into the trees. There were less people following this path and I wanted a little more peace and quiet, and perhaps a little less being stared at.

So I climbed, and climbed, until finally I reached the top, only to find an oddly charming rundown amusement park. Covered bumper cars, rusted rail tracks, and lonely swings were all that was left of what had clearly been a lively children’s play center. With the rain, the pollution that surrounds everything in an eerie fog, and the sudden quiet, the abandoned rides would have made an excellent setting for a horror movie.

Someone must have read my thoughts because a little ways down the path I came upon a haunted house. Suddenly, three teenage Chinese girls came out of nowhere and knocked on the door. To my surprise, it opened. An old lady took the girls admission fees, and then glanced at me and beckoned me in. Since I still can’t upload photos, picture instead, if you will, something like this:

 So for the exorbitant price of 10 kuai ($1.50, three times what I usually pay for meals) I found myself walking into a rusted Chinese horror house with three very frightened Chinese teenagers. Whether because I was the foreigner and that meant I was brave, or simply that I was expendable, they quickly pulled me to the front of the group to lead the way. After the lights flickered out, the girl immediately behind me suddenly grabbed my hand. And so I found myself, walking into the dark, leading a gaggle of skittish sixteen-year-olds.

Now, I love the cheesiest of horror movies and haunted houses, but this one was particularly disappointing. You could clearly see what was about to pop out at you, and I was even able to distinguish the trip-laser that triggered the mechanical devices as you walked by. Some of these included a giant hot-pink skull whose eyes flashed, a witch who looked like she had last been dusted off during the Salem Witch Trials, and a doctor who was supposed to be some sort of Dr. Frankenstein, but instead looked to be performing a routine appendectomy.

But the Chinese girls loved it, and therefore, so did I. Because really, when else was I ever going to be in a situation like this? After it was over, approx. three minutes after it had begun, I thanked the girls for the experience and asked to take their picture, to which they shyly replied, “No problem!”, posed, giggled, and ran-off.

Follow-up pictures to come in about a week and a half when my camera connector gets here!