A Harry Potter Halloween

A little late in the game, but here is a run-down of Halloween as promised!
Here's how it went:

After class (and an mid-term exam, mind you) Me, Zoe, and Lauren went to the empty apartment flat by our professors and made around two hundred pumpkin cookies. That is correct: approximately two zero zero cookies. It took us a fair amount of time between the hand mixing and quadrupling the recipe and baking sheet after sheet and after sheet in only one oven... It was a process. Even getting the ingredients was a bit of a struggle. The pumpkin came from a wonderful American family in my ward who brought it back from the states for me! Talk about coming in clutch (they also brought me real gum, so truly they are just the most wonderful people). It turns out chocolate chips and spices are not a normal grocery store item...? In what world, right? But we found some at Wholes Foods and all was well.

perks of making cookies in the empty flat?
climbing out the window four stories up. (it's what all the cool kids do)

What do we do while cookies are baking, you ask?
Psch. Easy.
Dance to One Direction of course.

Did I mention this Halloween was London's RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE? 75 degrees and sunny. 

Following the cookie baking extravaganza, Me and Ellen made a quick trip to our much beloved Chipotle because they were offering TWO POUND BURRITOS to anyone who came in costume on Halloween! I'm sorry. Two pound Chipotle burritos? I'm willing to pay ten so we obviously had to go take advantage for dinner. Chipotle is sort of our saving grace here.. England just does not do Mexican food and we all deeply miss it at times. At least, we deeply missed it until we discovered that Starbucks and Subway were not the only America food chains here. Three cheers to Chipotle and their blessed grilled chicken burrito!

After dinner came the actual party. Now, living in London with 40 students who all happen to also love Harry Potter, there really was only one option for a Halloween party: Harry Potter (obvi). We each got on Pottermore (the website designed by JK Rowling) and took the 'sorting quiz.' Then we dressed in our house colors/other costumes and competed for the house cup! It was so so fun. Emotions definitely were running high as the points got closer and closer.. We played a couple classic team games, like get the Oreo from the centre of your forehead to your mouth with no help or hands, and then finished with Harry Potter Trivia.
Talk about intense.. Haha the best part was definitely seeing the different house personalities coming out as we played. Slytherin's were dressed in black, intense, slightly snarky (esp. towards Gryffindor), and had a touch of sass and pride to them. Gryffindor's were loud, full of team pride, competitive, and always a little too into the game. Ravenclaw's remained cool and collected, always knowing the answers and maintaining their ground. Hufflepuff's were just laughing, not really caring about the score, and some looked slightly confused as to what was going on. It was epic. What else would you do if you lived at school in London??

Our awesome Centre facilitators 

 

 

After some calculating and final awarding of points, it was determined that Gryffindor did indeed win the house cup. (Please appreciate that we came from the bottom and knocked out Slytherin for it, just like the books/movies..)

Gryffindor, Gryffindor, GRYFFINDOR
**cheering voice/table banging**

At the end of the games we brought out the cookies and they were devoured within minutes. Seriously, with all the grabbing that went down you would think it was the Hunger Games or something. Or a bunch of high school boys, not college girls.. But I guess that just means they were good, right? **this is where everyone bows down to me for slaving away at them**

champions of the cooking making

Following the party everyone sort of split up to whatever; I spent some time dancing with a group in the front room, helping a few carve a pumpkin, and trick or treating to the professor's flats.

Harry and Hermione? 

After party festivities: Pumpkin Carving! 

All in all, it was honestly one of my favorite Halloweens so far. Full of all of my favorite things: pumpkin cookies, baking, grilled chicken burritos, Harry Potter, and good times with the best friends.

Love Always, Aimee

I'm Harry. Harry Potter.

 

 

Me: "Wait. Why are we holding pumpkins?"
Laur: "It's Halloween; just go with it"