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Saturday, November 1, 2008

NYC Halloween Parade 2008

We left our apartment just after sunset and headed towards the Jersey City PATH station to catch the train to the city. The station didn't look like the station that we know so well. It was packed with zombies, ghosts, monsters...I promise, I even saw Elvis! Joker was sitting next to me and a few Japanese ghost ( from the Ring) were sitting a few seats down. I knew then that it was going to be one interesting night.

We got off at the 14th St station. It took us a good 15 mins just to get out of the station. There were just too many people! At last we made it up to street level and I have never seen so many people before in my life! It was jammed pack and we couldn't even walk. We just had to move with the crowd. At one point, it was just at a stand still. People were shouting and it seems some lady and child were getting trampled. Oh well, welcome to NYC :P

We had to walk up about 5 blocks before we could actually breathe! I guess they were not joking when they said that 2 million people were expected to show up. I was very impressed that people actually took pains to dress up. The whole Greenwich Village area had all kinds of monsters, goblins, zombies and ghost lurking in every corner. Soon the parade started and truly, it was amazing. The were big ghost puppets flying around, ghost snakes, Asian ghost, Medieval times ghost....all kinds of ghost. Here are some pictures from the parade (some of them are mine, but the rest are taken from various people online).

Those are the famous giant puppets that they have almost every year, depending on the theme. This years theme was "Ghost", hence all the ghost flying around.

Of course there were many people in drag. Hey, it's the village! ;P There were also a few groups of girls dressed in nothing but body paint. I didn't take pictures of that but google it if you are interested. Haha.

This is one of the funnier parts of the parade! A whole group of Richard Simmons, complete with the singlet and short shorts, doing some aerobic routine!

Now, here is the highlight of the night. Well, at least for me. This year is Michael Jackson's Thriller's 25th anniversary. To celebrate this, over 200 people dressed up as zombies, lead by "MJ" joined the parade and did the full Thriller dance at various intervals! It's just a sight to behold. So many zombies talking down the street in the middle of NYC and breaking out in the Thriller dance. I read somewhere that it took them months to learn the choreography and they did it so well. Here is a clip of it that I took off YouTube from the NY1 channel news. Enjoy!

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