Halloween is absolutely terrifying in Saint John, NB. In no way is this a competition but this man on the west side of town has the coolest display of all. I was just asking him if the scarecrow by the door would be substituted by a real person in costume to spring a surprise on the big night when his son demonstrated that it was animatronic. That surprise was already covered.
Just imagine what this place will look like on Halloween night. These pictures were taken 3 weeks early and he was just beginning to assemble everything. Check out the video of his animatronic horror in motion!
Landing in Fredericton, I quickly got in the mood for Halloween when I popped into Dollarama and got myself a warm hat. They had lots of cheap scary toys.
And lots of rubber vermin.
Flying vermin.
Mutant vermin.
I hadn't seen anything yet. Home Depot had these truly enormous evil skeletons. With something this large, you can't help but wonder how you could possibly get them home. The answer is they come partially disassembled in a box.
Dad humored me and stood between them to give a better perspective of just how large these things were.
Some houses have mutant spider problems.
This is a wonderful display on Douglas Ave.
The coffin below is handmade and the severed hands crawl around on top.
Bat houses.
After all these wonderful decorations on people's front yards, I was excited to check out the Haunted Campground event at Rockwood Park. Sadly, it was a disappointing affair. When I'd first heard about it, the information posted on the net was contradictory. Originally the post said the terror would begin on the 19th and later, without deleting the first mistake, it would begin on the 26th. I should have taken that as a bad sign. That's exactly what it was.
6 pm was scheduled as Scary-Lite, a toned-down version of the adventure for small children. The real horror would begin at 7 pm. It was all Scary-Lite.
This odd figure in the trees might have been intended as Bigfoot. It was barely visible off in the dark distant trees and only this much was seen by the flash of my camera. Bigfoot? Big deal.
Um, seriously? A balloon ghost? That is rather low end.
I suppose a little work went into the giant spider but you had to look a few times to make sure that's what it was.
This poor woman's job was to lie on that cold cold ground and startle people as they walked by. But you couldn't see her, just some dark shape going Rahhhhh. Whether a zombie or rabid meth addict, she was the scariest thing in the whole park and nobody could see her without flash cameras.
Look out for that scary witch, if you can even see her. Nothing was lit very well and I believe they were counting on that to hide how lame and lackluster everything was just as monster movies from the 1950s wouldn't show the goofy monster until the end.
So, out of 5 stars, I give the Rockwood Park Haunted Campground a zero. That's right. Zero stars. The shame of it is that there is a demand for this type of thing in Saint John. There was a long line when I entered and a longer one when I was leaving. That is a lot of people to disappoint. A father with three children decided at the gate that the 14-dollar admission was too steep and turned right around. He was so right!
From the park, I headed downtown, riding up Waterloo Rowe (significantly scarier than the whole park fiasco) past meth addicts pimping out the one woman in the gang for a fix, past the sketchy bars on Union Street and down to the newly gentrified downtown core for something much more wholesome, Saint John's first Day of the Dead celebration.
By the time I arrived, any ceremonies or events were finished. Even so, more real effort was apparent here and there was no admission fee. This spectacular altar spanned more than half of the short block. An alley to the left had Mexican music where a few Catrinas were still dancing.
Carving pumpkins up and sticking candles in them overnight condemns them to an early grave in a compost heap so I hope this idea of painting faces on pumpkins catches on. When the night is done, they are still edible.
By sheer stubborn will, the little Canon works again. I had given up on it after more than a week with no sign of life and was just off to a place that recycles these things when I pressed the power button on impulse and saw the dimmest glimmer of life. The screen read E-something error. I took my shoes off and hit the internet.
On the advice of some website, I took out the battery and tapped the camera on my desk. White powder, mineral deposits from Cheonggye Stream, fell out like dandruff and we were back in business. If only I had stopped there, I could have saved myself another week and a half of experimental tinkering.
I wanted to make it better than new so I took it apart with a mini-screwdriver set. I was careful, just not careful enough. It all became more complicated when a tiny part below the power button, apparently an important one, tinkled out of place. A lot of trial and error to figure out where it fit and how to get it to stay put while putting everything else back, besides taking the entire apartment apart to find a tiny screw I only thought had rolled off the table, and it was fixed for the second time. If only I had stopped there.
I went to Seolbong Park early next morning for some exercise before the heat wave drove me back to the air conditioning. A lot of people had the same idea. 7 in the morning and people were already working out and descending from the trail. I brought the camera along for a shot of the compressed air hose people use to blow dust and sweat from their shoes after a hike. The laptop gets this treatment once a month and it does wonders for performance. A good blast should have taken care of any deposits the desk taps had missed. It probably did but another essential part, apparently attached by just a microscopic dab of solder, fell off. I could still focus the lens but the shutter button wouldn't move.
There was no sense in quitting now even though I had two loose parts to finesse into place and hold still while reassembling the casing. I was in over my head but there was no stopping. I sat on one of three benches under a sun shelter and got to work.
I had been experimenting for almost an hour with the new broken piece when a random scary guy came by with his wife to hassle me. He didn't speak English. I don't speak Korean. Normal people just let it go with friendly smiles and move along. This guy kept talking away in a tone I didn't like while his horrible wife threw back her head and laughed at everything he said. I was not getting a good vibe from them at all. I would have loved to just ignore them but the man had no intention of allowing that to happen.
He pulled the hair on my arms and compared it with his smooth one. Children do that at school. They find it pretty fascinating. It's not something they see too often. But this guy was at least approaching my age and it was a total violation of personal space. There was nothing lacking in his non verbal skills as he offered several times to take my camera and smash it under his foot. His loud wife found that so funny. He reached through the buttons of my shirt, pulled my chest hair, grimaced and fanned his nose in disgust. The second grab for my arm hair confirmed I might be in for serious trouble when he showed me the gang tattoos, some kind of Asian characters, on his left arm.
I've been warned that if you get in a fight in Korea, all parties are arrested, even if you only acted in self-defense and that it is unheard of for the court to decide in a foreigner's favour. If you manage to gain the upper hand, you still owe the other guy blood money. It's a lose lose situation for everyone involved and besides all of this, I'm not a fighter at all while every man in this country has at least had a few years of military training. Of course, even with all these good reasons to play nice, fights still happen. Too much rage, alcohol, stupidity or plain meanness is all it takes for reason to vanish. The best advice is to get away from the situation. Run. And that goes double if you encounter a gang member.
Outside of the gangs, no one wears real tattoos in Korea. It isn't considered cool or attractive. I would have loved to get off the bench and walk away from this guy right then or run if he started to follow me. He was menacing and there was no telling how far he might go. But my camera was in pieces. Eventually he got up and left me alone after pulling my chest hair one more time and raising his shirt to show me his belly. I got lucky. Either by design or out of boredom, the woman walked away down the hill and he decided to follow, leaving me with a hand not quite steady enough to tinker with tiny camera parts so I packed it in and left soon after, once he was well out of sight.
Days later, I finally figured out that shutter button piece. In the right place, it looks upside down so it took a while. The camera works.
Here are some of the pictures taken on that fateful day at Bukhansan and Cheonggye Stream. The Youtube video from that day stops about 15 seconds before the Canon slipped out of my pocket.
Nobody needs two cameras and I found a great home for my personally refurbished Canon. From now on, I'll be playing with the water proof Olympus. It all ends well.
