I work in a workplace where a lot of people dress up, and where the customers/patrons/children seem to appreciate/enjoy costumes, so I would like to wear a costume to work on Halloween.

I own these two wigs (link to the pink one; blue one apparently no longer available):

screenshot from Amazon.com

I am willing to buy:

• clothes I can wear again for other occasions
• especially a froofy dress, like this one or this one that have been in my cart anyway
• small, inexpensive accessories
• a tutu, because I’d enjoy the excuse
• not much; I don’t even really LIKE Halloween normally

The costume does not have to involve the wigs or a dress or a tutu. The costume must be:

• work-appropriate (library) (shouldn’t be scary to little children)
• moveable and not warm (I move around a lot and get overheated)
• relatively easy to understand/explain

Here is a costume I have already used twice for this purpose and could theoretically use again but would probably buy new wings because the wings I’ve been using were made for, like, a gradeschooler, and are snug and uncomfortable:

• bee (yellow-and-black striped shirt no longer available to link to; wings from a child’s costume we had in our Halloween costume box; antennae made from a headband and black pipecleaners)

Here are some costumes I have considered:

• Barbie! I could wear a pink gingham dress and add a daisy necklace (it’s pink-centered white flowers in the movie, but daisy is close enough and I’m more willing to buy it) and put my hair back in a pink bow! But even though I VERY MUCH enjoyed the Barbie movie, I am not sure I want to…dress as Barbie. Or maybe I do! I go back and forth. I won’t/can’t wear heels, so would have to figure out shoes.

(image from Amazon.com)

• Crayon, using a t-shirt that roughly matches either wig. But I don’t really like…t-shirts made to be costumes. Even though they seem like they would EXACTLY fit my issue, which is that I want to wear a costume but I don’t want to spend much money or be too overheated.

screenshot from Amazon.com

(image from Amazon.com)

• Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz! I could get the blue gingham dress and put my hair in two weird ponytails and wear red Converse and carry a stuffed animal in a basket! This would be a leading contender except that I don’t like The Wizard of Oz! or Dorothy! But it meets all of my requirements: easy to recognize/explain; I can buy a dress I don’t mind buying; I already have the other items. And does it really MATTER if I don’t like her/it?

(image from Amazon.com)

• Princess Bubblegum! I could buy the pink gingham dress (she wears solid pink but gingham is close enough and I’m more likely to re-wear), and wear the pink wig (it’s not her hairstyle/length, but it’s pink), and figure out the crown using cardboard or something. But…I am not sure Adventure Time / Princess Bubblegum is well-known enough to be easy to explain.

screenshot from Amazon.com

(image from Amazon.com)

• Cat or mouse or whatever! I could wear the ears and the tail, and put a pink-lipstick nose and black-eyeliner whiskers on my face! I have not seen cat/mouse ear/tail sets I like, but I could keep looking.

• Just wear a pink or blue wig and call it a day! There’s no law that it has to be a whole costume!

I would love to dress as something I am an ardent fan of! But…I don’t think I am a fan of anything that works as a costume. I could dress as Love Nikki Dress Up Queen, but that is not anything most people would recognize. I could dress as a Pokemon Go character, but that is not a costume I can assemble out of items I already have and/or can use again.

This topic will involve some overlap with other posts, but so be it; we are thorough or we are nothing.

And I hope we can all remember that “surprise,” in and of itself, is not inherently positive or negative: surprise can be positive or negative or neutral; and surprise can be STRONGLY one way, or MILDLY one way, or anything in between. Some of these surprises I am about to tell you about will unavoidably carry the indication of what kind of surprise it was (such as the disheartening dismay of no rice with the Chinese food, which meant we hadn’t ordered anywhere near enough food)—but others are NEUTRAL: just things I noted at the time as things I didn’t know would be the case, and was interested to find were the case, and thought others might be similarly interested to know. And of course some are POSITIVE, such as good bath-product scents and fun yogurt flavors! Or even if the experiences are unavoidably interpreted as MILDLY negative (such as water going out of the shower onto the floor), it was not a particularly negative experience FOR ME, since I don’t OWN or need to CLEAN the bathroom where that’s happening, and am FULLY ABLE to cope with the measure of “putting a towel down to catch the water”—and so it is not a HARSH CRITICISM OF ALL OF ENGLAND AND ALL ITS PEOPLE AND ALSO OF THIS ENTIRE TRIP, it is just something I thought you would be interested to hear about, in a Let’s Marvel at the Wide World and All Its Infinite Variation sort of way, and in the same way as I might tell you about unfamiliar practices I encountered in other regions of my own home country. Let’s practice a little!:

We were surprised when we ordered Chinese take-out food in England and it did not come with, in order of surprise from least to most: fortune cookies (I’d heard elsewhere that fortune cookies were a United-States-Chinese thing), disposable chopsticks, RICE. (Only the rice was impactful: it took a meal we thought would heartily feed seven people and turned it into a hearty snack.) And it DID come with what we have since discovered were PRAWN CRACKERS, which did not seem like either prawn or crackers but instead like some sort of puffed-rice cup; our two vegetarians were alarmed to find out afterward that they’d accidentally eaten prawn.

(Practice round! This was clearly a NEGATIVE surprise, and in fact a BOUQUET of negative surprises. And the timing was particularly bad for this kind of surprise: we had become over-hungry, and then we encountered NUMEROUS hurdles for everything about that meal, from not being able to find anywhere to eat, to not being able to use the hotel-room phone to order delivery, to calling places from the lobby only to find they could not take our order or could not deliver it until, for example, 9:30 at night. And then we finally succeeded in placing an order!!! but then it wasn’t enough food because there was no rice, and our vegetarians unknowingly ate something they wouldn’t have eaten. Nevertheless: we are not trying to blame ALL OF ENGLAND, or ANY of England, for this set of surprises; this could have happened in any unfamiliar ordering situation. It could have been a good lesson for us about being more educated about our options—except that in this case, it never would have occurred to us that Chinese food wouldn’t come with rice: we have lived in and/or traveled to the U.S. west coast, the U.S. east coast, and several places in between, and in all of those places rice has come with the food. For us, this was like needing to know to ask the restaurant if the sandwich comes with bread, and also needing to ask if the bread is vegetarian: we didn’t know that we didn’t know that we didn’t know. So it was more of a lesson in knowing that we won’t always know that we don’t know we don’t know. And that in that case we CAN eat small portions of non-planned food out of hotel mugs with coffee spoons, and search online for anything we don’t recognize, and then fill up on cookies. It is, bottom line, a lesson in making sure we have lots of cookies.)

I was surprised by how much wetter the eggs were cooked: fried eggs with liquid yolks, wet scrambled eggs rather than dry. (Practice round! This was a NEUTRAL surprise! It was interesting that eggs were, routinely and in every case we encountered them, cooked DIFFERENTLY than we would normally encounter eggs where we live. It was neither positive nor negative, just different/surprising. Obviously we could have asked for them to be cooked differently if it had been a negative surprise, and this option occurred to us immediately and without effort!)

I was surprised by the looser alcohol restrictions. Hard liquor was available in regular grocery/convenience stores; 18-year-olds (and even 16-year-olds) were served liquor without being carded. (Practice round! This was a NEUTRAL surprise! It was interesting that the rules and enforcements were so completely different than in our usual experience. It was neither positive nor negative, just different/surprising when compared to the way it is where we are in the United States, where I still get carded sometimes even though I have CHILDREN old enough to drink, and where my 22-year-old was prevented from buying alcohol because he was accompanied by someone who could NOT legally buy alcohol, and where grocery stores can sell only lower-proof items such as wine and beer.)

Okay, enough practice! I will rely on you to handle it from here onward, and I will not feel the need to keep reminding you that “encountering something different, and remarking upon it with interest” does not mean “criticizing it and calling it bad.”

Also: keep in mind that I am a relatively NEW traveler. We do not take vacations: as with “going out to eat,” this was one of the things we voluntarily traded in order to have five children. (Not because NO ONE can do it: I know PLENTY of large families go out to eat, and take vacations. But because WE couldn’t.) The most traveling I’ve done is in the last few years, when I’ve been driving kids to and from college, and going on college visits. So maybe you will be surprised to find that I was surprised by something, and maybe you would like to cherish that silently within your heart!

This may have just been the particular hotels we stayed in, but all of the showers had half-or-less glass doors. Like, half-or-more of the bathtub/shower area was completely open, with unblocked water flying out onto the floor to some extent, ranging from “almost none, how it is almost none when this is wide open??” to “we had to put down a whole towel just to soak up all the water that flew out because there was not enough door/curtain stopping it from doing so.” I can’t claim to have been FULLY SURPRISED by this, because several commenters mentioned it ahead of time—but I still felt a little surprised to see it in actual practice, because it seemed so UNLIKELY, and particularly because several other commenters had said “WHAT?? That was not our experience at all!!,” so I admit I’d wondered if the first group of commenters had encountered something rare.

Again, this may have been just the particular hotels we stayed in, but none of the bathrooms had fans to remove the steamy air. At least one had what seemed to be a non-working fan; more than one had no apparent fan mechanism of any kind.

Again-again, this may have been just the particular hotels we stayed in, but all of them had what were to me DELIGHTFULLY-scented bath products. I am accustomed to the products in the U.S. hotels we usually stay in, which usually smell like public-bathroom handsoap (i.e., cheap/chemical/institutional), or else like artificial coconut.

Again-again-again maybe just the particular hotels, but anyway the light switches were OUTSIDE the bathroom doors. Which would have been fine if the lights for the rest of the room weren’t in the same panel. So if, for example, you got up and did not remember that the bathroom lightswitch was the second one in from the left in this hotel, you would turn on the light for the entire room when you got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night; and, even if you DID remember, you turned on the bathroom light and then had to open the door and let the light flood into the room. Paul, fortunately, had inexplicably assumed I’d want a nightlight for the room (I never sleep with a nightlight), and so he put that nightlight in the bathroom so we wouldn’t have to turn on the bathroom lights at night. I have added “bathroom nightlight” to my Future Travel List.

We were surprised by how extremely hot the water was: many places (hotels and public restrooms) had little stickers warning about the heat of the water, which was easily more than hot enough to scald. In one of our hotel rooms, hot water came scaldingly out of the cold water faucets as well, and we had to let it run for a few minutes until it started being cold. Ample, ample hot water, is what I’m saying.

In one case, the light switches in a hotel room seemed not to work at all. Luckily, we were traveling with a cosmopolitan group, so I thought to group-chat them about it before going down to check with reception: it turned out we were supposed to put our hotel key-card into a slot right inside the door, in order to operate the electricity in the room. Maybe you already knew this, and would like to have a little chuckle! Or maybe instead you will file this away and it will save you later from other people having a little chuckle at you.

This might have been the particular areas we traveled to, but I was surprised to need reservations even for casual pubs and pizza places. The travel agent had advised us to make reservations, but her phrasing made me think she meant we should make reservations if there were PARTICULAR places we had our hearts set on, in order to avoid disappointment. Instead it was Pretty Much Everywhere. One night my half-group went to a pub and I felt self-conscious about our reservation once we arrived and it was three-quarters empty and extremely casual—but then we heard group after group being turned away at the door for not having a reservation, with the server saying they were “completely full for both sittings.”

I was surprised not to be able to buy Dramamine (meclizine hydrochloride); if we traveled again, I would bring TONS of it. Thanks to you, I was not surprised to need to bring our own melatonin, benadryl, and hydrocortisone cream. (There was a later discussion that indicated we could have acquired hydrocortisone cream by asking a pharmacist; still, I was glad to have it with me already when a child acquired an unexpected hive.)

I was surprised at how many women I saw wearing dresses, just out and about, casually. It’s not that dresses are so uncommon in my experience, or anyway I don’t THINK of them as so uncommon. But something about the number of dresses I saw in England was enough to catch my eye as unusual. And lots more fun patterns than I’m used to seeing! It made me want to wear more dresses.

I was surprised at how easy it was to go through Customs, in both directions. Regular airport security was the usual barking unhappy experience both ways: “EVERYTHING OUT OF YOUR POCKETS AND INTO THE BINS”/”SHOES OFF”/”MA’AM THAT NEEDS TO BE IN A SEPARATE BIN”/”SIGH, NO, YOU HAVE TO WALK STRAIGHT THROUGH, DON’T HESITATE”/”HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD”/etc., with several of the kids being put through additional screenings and backpack-searches. But CUSTOMS, which I was MUCH more worried about (especially coming home, because I’d heard U.S. Customs was pretty much The Worst, even to their own citizens, which did not remotely surprise me), was a breeze both times—so that both times, we ended up out of the whole process saying, “Wait: did we do it? Was that all? Did we miss something?” We’d talked to the children ahead of time about how we would be separated and asked questions, maybe odd questions about whether we’d walked in pastures (that specific example came up in Paul’s research), and then none of that happened at all. On our way into England, we weren’t even checked by a person: we just had to stand at a device that scanned our passport and our face; one of us got a “See an agent” alert, but there were no visible agents to see, so that person just started over at a new machine and this time was passed through. On our way into the U.S., we were checked by a person who checked us all together as a group, no separating us, and only checked each passport/face and asked one of us (Paul) if we had any food. I will note that both times, in both directions, I saw people who were not-white being detained for further screening/questioning. I’m not saying it was because they were not-white. But: they were not-white, and it happened both times in both directions, and there was more than one not-white person both times in both directions.

I would be VERY INTERESTED to hear about things that have surprised you in your travels!

I will start by saying this: I wish I’d bought MORE. But it was hard to know what I wanted, especially early on in the trip. And I kept seeing, for example, LONDON-themed souvenirs when we had not been to London, and never really DID go to London (we spent a few hours there the evening before our next-morning flight), and I didn’t want souvenirs from a place I hadn’t gone—but I also wasn’t sure I wanted, say, a lot of Windsor-themed souvenirs specifically, when we were spending a few days there and then going on to Bath and the Cotswolds.

Well. Again: in the future, I will err on the side of buying, because as I was unpacking my suitcase I was happy to see every single thing I’d bought, and wished only that I’d been less careful/restrained.

My old messenger bag BROKE on the trip (it was the zipper), and I VERY MUCH wanted to replace it in England (EXACTLY the kind of Unplanned Souvenir I was hoping for!), but I did not find anything I liked well enough. I wish I had bought something anyway—but I kept thinking maybe later on I would find something I wanted more, and I didn’t want to spend, say, fifty pounds on a bag I was so-so about, and then maybe see one I LOVED. Well. A missed opportunity.

I wish I had bought a RAINCOAT in England. So many people were wearing such cute ones! But I was not in the right frame of mind to be trying on clothes.

I wish we had gone when there was a Queen, because so much merchandise was related to the new Boy Queen, and I am not interested in him.

I wish I had bought birthday cards in England to send over the next year to all the people I went on the trip with! That would have been fun: “I bought you this card ON OUR TRIP TO ENGLAND!!”

That concludes the Didn’t Buy section; now for the Did Buy.

The souvenir umbrellas (one country flag, one London skyline) mentioned in a previous post, plus two decks of cards (the other deck is in the possession of the children) and a set of four egg spoons (for lil yogurts rather than eggs; two of the spoons are in the dishwasher and the other two are a little hard to see against the countertop pattern):

A tea towel I cannot show you because it is not hanging up and it is not in the washing machine so I am not sure where it is, but I suspect it went through the wash when one of the kids did their laundry (we toss used towels/washclothes into the empty washing machine), and is now in a clean laundry basket in a kid’s room. Well, it was the Strawberry Thief pattern, so I was able to get this picture of it off a William Morris shop website:

image from https://wmgallery.shop

Fridge magnets!

The Windsor one is sparkly/metallic, and I bought it at the same place where I bought my first souvenir umbrella. The Trout Farm one I just thought was funny. A trout farm!

Multiple bags of biscuits/cookies, crackers, tea cakes, candy, etc.:

(Also several wee jars of jam lifted from hotel breakfasts.)

A Dutchess mug from Blenheim Castle:

It was an uncharacteristic purchase: I am not usually someone who likes, for example, aprons labeled Queen of My Kitchen or whatever. But I saw it, I liked it, I felt it wasn’t characteristic and I wondered if it would survive the airline flinging it around so I decided not to buy it—and then I kept wanting it, so I thought, “Well, if it’s like twenty pounds I won’t buy it,” and it was seven pounds so I bought it.

The prize of my collection, a Penhaligon’s scent sampler:

There could have been no souvenir more relevant to my interests. It has a 2ml sample of each of ten scents, including The Coveted Duchess Rose, Juniper Sling, and The Favorite. I can’t even open it yet, I am too excited.

As we were packing for this trip, I went to my stash of tiny notebooks to choose one for my purse, so I could write things down if I wanted/needed to. And my stash was not where I thought it was. And it was not any of the places I thought I could have moved it. I had to keep myself from going into Tear the House Apart mode. Anyway when I saw some little notebooks in England, I bought them:

Lavender linen spray:

This was a little iffy because it was so BLATANTLY marketed to tourists. Like, obviously ALL of this is marketed to tourists. But these Cotswold lavender displays were everywhere, and the labeling looked so generic. But…I do like lavender, and I do like the idea of linen spray, and we did visit The Cotswolds where they did talk about lavender, so I bought a bottle and I’m glad I did.

Paul bought this little printed oath from the Oxford Library for me to bring into work:

I bought a Christmas ornament that looks like one of the red post boxes I had fun finding so I could send postcards, but I have already put that away with the Christmas stuff so you will just have to imagine it.

Commenters Annabeth and Sophie suggested buying reusable shopping bags from English shops, and that was a very fun idea I hadn’t thought of. I bought this one at Marks & Spencer:

And finally: POSTCARDS. A small selection:

One of our traveling companions mentioned that x years ago in England (I’m half-remembering she said “ten,” but am not confident), you couldn’t even GET drip coffee. Now apparently you can, but I don’t know if we encountered that option, because I was so busy ordering the widely-available-and-not-expensive cappuccinos simply left and right. Sometimes the server would ask if I wanted chocolate powder on it, and sometimes they would just add it automatically.

I learned on this trip that an “Americano” coffee is an espresso watered down with hot water. My understanding is that this was an earlier attempt to simulate the drip coffee Americans were accustomed to, before drip was available, which apparently it is now, not that I looked, because I had not realized it was an interesting thing to look for. One tactful description said something about how an Americano was “the delicious flavor of espresso” but “less intense.”

At the hotel breakfasts, it was French-press coffee, the little pot delivered to the table; some hotels offered Americano coffee as an alternative. There were two-person pots and one-person pots; I would say the two-person pot was the amount of coffee I wanted for my one person. My sister-in-law and I found we needed to strategize to get as much coffee as we were used to: either we would drink a cup in the hotel room before coming down to breakfast, or we would get a coffee at our first tour stop after breakfast. One of our hotel rooms had a Nespresso machine, and Paul got into the lovely, lovely, can-we-import-that habit of making me an espresso as soon as I started waking up, and bringing it to me while I was still in bed. I would check email on my phone and sip my little espresso.

I did not drink much tea. I know: I should have! I should have! I’d thought I WOULD; I’m disappointed that I didn’t! But it turns out that if I am offered coffee or tea, I find it difficult to choose tea. I find it difficult every single time. Even when I ordered “a cream tea” (a scone with clotted cream and jam, plus tea or coffee), I went for the coffee option. The only time I drank tea was when we Went For Tea (like, with the tiered trays and so forth); then I ordered Earl Grey. If we ever go back to England, I am going to COMMIT to drinking more tea, if only so that I can SAY I drank lots of tea.

Many, many people told us ahead of time that in England you can’t get ice in your drinks and/or can’t get as much ice as you’re used to. I wanted to offer a personal report, but I am having trouble remembering. I don’t think I ordered soda a single time while we were there; when we asked for water, I don’t think it ever came with ice, but actually I am not completely sure.

I was sometimes puzzled by water choices: we would ask for it at a restaurant, and the server would say “Sparkling, still, or tap?” Well, let’s see. I know what sparkling is, and I WOULD know what still was, except that they offered tap, so now I’m not sure. My guess was that if I said “still,” it would be bottled and I would see it on the bill, and if I said “tap” it would be free, but I did not do enough testing to draw a firm conclusion.

I see no ice

Two of our nights in England, we went to a pub within walking distance of our hotel; going to a pub for drinks was one of my England Trip Goals. I had never been to a bar, let alone a pub, so there was some learning. I knew what “a tab” was, but not how to start or manage or pay one. I knew about people “buying rounds,” but didn’t know how to do that, or how to make it come out right, or how to stop caring about it coming out right. I felt like the most sensible arrangement would be for everyone to pay for their own drinks so no one has to keep mental track of anything while tipsy and everyone can make their own financial decisions in re beer vs cocktails and so forth—but once someone buys a round, there’s no stopping it and you have to join in.

Even though I found pub-round etiquette uncomfy and incompatible with my natural-born temperament, I enjoyed going to the pubs and would want to do that again the next time. And I DID like how “buying a round” made it easier to add snacks to the table that everyone could share: if I’m buying this round, and I also get some chips (I MEAN CRISPS), then it’s clearer that those are for everyone to eat, not just for me to eat. They’re part of the round.

One night we had dinner at a pub, and wanted to order a beer with my meal but didn’t know how. The server brought food menus but no drink menus. At the table next to us, I heard someone say “Do you have a dry white wine?” and the server said “Yes; small, medium, or large pour?” But…how did the person ordering it know how much it would cost, then? Or what sizes small/medium/large were? And wouldn’t you want to know what all the drink options were, rather than asking individually if each option existed? Well, I am sure there must have been a way to do it, because I saw other people drinking beer and wine, but I couldn’t figure it out. Obviously I should have asked—but by the time I realized it wouldn’t be intuitive, it felt too late.

Speaking of pubs: the legal drinking age in England is 18. The twins are 18, so I told them to bring their licenses if they wanted to try a legal drink in England. BUT ALSO: there seemed to be approximately zero carding. At one restaurant, the ordering was done using a device at the table, and we ordered two hard ciders, one for Elizabeth and one for William. Then I went to use the bathroom, and the drinks were delivered to the table of kids while I was gone—and no one checked the kids’ IDs. On another occasional, William ordered a beer; he was not carded. One restaurant brought everyone a little glass of champagne, including one for Henry, age 16; no one even ASKED how old anyone was.

In the U.S., I am more accustomed to card-everyone policies, or AT LEAST to card-everyone-who-looks-under-40 policies. Businesses can get into serious trouble if they sell alcohol to anyone not old enough to drink it. When the kids were trying to buy us a bottle of champagne for our anniversary, the store wouldn’t sell it to William, age 22 and therefore allowed to buy alcohol, because Elizabeth was with him. We wondered if in England there are not such severe penalties for violations, so the enforcement doesn’t have to be so rigid. Or maybe with a lower drinking age, there just aren’t anywhere near as many violations to worry about.