Yesterday I finally found three pumpkins that weren’t chopped up into pieces and were a decent shape for jack-o-lanterns. This is great because after not being able to find any pumpkins at all last year, and so far this year only seeing those long skinny ones, I was just about to entertain Emirhan’s Plan B of trying to make a jack-o-lantern out of a watermelon.

I nearly panicked yesterday when I told the guy which pumpkins I wanted and then I stopped paying attention while I thought he was bagging them up, and I turned back around to discover him with a huge butcher knife, getting ready to attack my pumpkins. I screamed “NOOOOOOO!”, which stopped him just in time. I told him I wanted the pumpkins whole. He wrinkled his face at me and said, “but you’ll never be able to carry them home like that, just let me chop them up into more manageable pieces and bag them for you.” I had to scream at him again to get him to stop, and explained that if he cut the pumpkins they would be useless to me and I wouldn’t pay for them. I had brought my gigantic backpack, so I’d put one in there and he could bag the other two and I’d carry one in each hand. I only live a block away, it’s not going to kill me to carry them. I really had to fight him on this issue, and to begin with he kept trying to get me to take these other phallus-shaped pumpkins because he said that the ones I chose were the most flavourless of the bunch. I tried several times to explain that I wasn’t planning on eating them anyway, but it was lost on him. He really thought I was completely crazy.

No one here has ever heard of Halloween. It’s my favourite holiday.

Anyway, I rescued the only three suitable jack-o-lantern pumpkins in all of Antalya. Go me.

Well, I thought they were the only three, but then Emirhan surprised me yesterday by bringing home a fourth one. Four pumpkins + four people = one jack-o-lantern each. I’ve been roped in to teach pumpkin carving class— finally something I’m qualified to do! We’ll probably carve on Monday or Tuesday. I spent some of my time this morning looking at flickr’s collection of jack-o-lanterns and trying to get ideas. I’m really looking forward to taking photos of the finished products.

You guys doing anything special for All Hallow’s Eve?