During the week leading up to Halloween I began a search for pumpkins by asking around if anyone had seen any for sale or did they perhaps know someone who would know. (Pretty much everything here is carried out through word of mouth.) I remained optimistic until the very end, as a number of Gabonese actually knew which vegetable I was talking about and mentioned that they had seen them for sale in the past, but couldn't remember where or exactly when it was....
The day before Halloween I gave up the search though and went for the next best thing - watermelons. Our Wednesday replacement guard Hervé was in for a surprise that day when he was told we needed his help in creating a spooky-faced-hollowed-out-watermelon that we would later put a candle in and place on the fence in front of the house. Once I drew a picture of the face he understood generally what it should look like but still seemed confused as to why anyone would do this and what was that candle idea all about?
See here for Hervé's bemusement:
I wasn't too sure what the final result would be once it was dark out and candles were lit, but we all had a lot of fun working on our new jack-o-lantern concept. Of the 4 of us though only Hervé likes watermelon, so he lucked out and got to eat all the contents.
He may not have understood why we would waste such a perfectly good fruit, but he sure was a good sport! Here is our first creation:
And our two halloween beauties that afternoon (Hervé got really into it and came up with the idea of carving out a hairline, as can be seen on our friend on the right)
When I first set them out in front of the house to "scare the neighbors" -as Jourdain and Cilia had explained to Hervé'- I was moderately satisfied, thinking that somehow orange just looks better and these are not terribly authentic looking.....until I set the candles in them and .........
in the end they looked just as good as any I had ever made in the past!!(With the exception of Hervé's hairline which was in fact a great idea!!)
