Halloween in Siem Reap

Halloween as an American holiday that has changed over the years.  When I was a kid, I feel like it was a kid focused day, with kids dressing up in their favorite character or something.  We had those sticky plastic suits with the thin vacuum-formed plastic masks that might last the night but wouldn’t last much longer than that.

I’m not sure where everyone else was, I didn’t pay attention to other people.  I went through a stage when I would make my own costumes: I was a pilot in a plane, a chicken drum stick…this continued unto I was married and a full on adult when I was a giant singing cyber cow, a space shuttle (accompanies by Vincent dress as an astronaut), a football player with Liam and my favorite of all A puppet show.

 

Recent years I’ve seen that Halloween has become really focused on gory, scary and wicked thing.  I don’t like it. I’ve never thought horror/terror-based entertainment was too fun and I prefer fun Halloween.

I guess you so see some cartoon and movie characters that are not purely scary based: Elsa, Simba from the lion king, classic witch costumes, DJ’s…that kind of thing.

Whatever is happening here

Another thing that has changed is where kids trick-or-treat. When I was a kid, kids usually stayed in their own neighborhoods, or the neighborhoods of their friends.  Mostly locations that could walk to in the pursuit of the candy.

Now it is the practice to go to the good neighborhoods for the good stuff, or go to strip malls, where businesses hand out candy and advertising for the safe stuff, or parking lots where people park their cars and hand out to candy for some reason (I’m not sure of this).

I’ve been a little disillusioned with Halloween for a while mostly because I’m old, my kids go out on there own and no one trick-or-treats at our house…until now.

Halloween has started to spread to the rest of the world. My only cross-cultural experience with Halloween is here in Siem Reap.

The largest social area in Siem Reap is Pub Street. Its been one of my most common hang out locations for my time here.  It’s very touristy and very heavy on the bars and restaurants, with many street venders and shops, oh and many tuk-tuk drivers seeking riders…also sometimes asking if I was looking for drugs, tours of the temples and/or some sort of lady-based entertainment (which never happen to me here before, but I guess I haven’t been alone here before). Nice thing is that I’ve been here long enough, all the extra questions have stopped being asked.

Every night at Pub Street, the police block street traffic so people can walk freely down the street. The average night you’ll see several tour groups, a handful of ex-pats, some locals and me.

On Halloween night, I swear the entire city came out to Pub Street. It was crowded and loud, people were having fun and many dressed up. 

Some just used face makeup

A lot of kids

And some when all the way

I didn’t dress up, I came straight from the elephants. For me the most fun was sitting at my favorite bar “the Goooooal” and watching people just have fun.

I also took selfies with some of my favorite costumes.

As it goes here in Cambodia there was also the obligatory dance off:

The best part was that it wasn’t about getting candy or scaring people it was about a community coming together and having fun.  No drama, no one trying to be cool, no one taking anything too serious.