Features

If you’re anything like us, a lot of time, you’re hungry on campus. If you’re even more like us, you have a tendency to stick with tried and true choices rather than branching out and exploring the plethora of dining options at UCI.

My 6-year -old heart skipped a beat during the moment Leonardo DiCaprio appeared on the massive, outdoor screen. I grabbed a handful of Cheetos from the bag on my lap and stared at him in awe from the passenger’s seat of my parents’ 1986 Toyota Corolla. I was frozen with suspense the moment the glorious RMS Titanic began to sink, but there was no doubt in my mind that my beloved Leo would make it out alive.

One of the biggest challenges to overcome while studying abroad is the language barrier. Whether you’re in Barcelona, Tokyo, Rome or Paris, there is always a wall that blocks communication between you and everyone else.

Besides ghosts, goblins and evil witches, Halloween is the time for kids to rot their teeth out and satisfy their ultimate sugar rush. When I was a child, my parents would always triple-check the candy that I had collected in my trick-or-treat bag to make sure that some creepy person didn’t poison me.

When I was little, I believed that ghosts were friendly creatures with good senses of humor and a keen sense of fun. Oh, how deceiving those “Casper the Friendly Ghost” morning reruns were. Today, I honestly don’t know what to believe.

I did some ghost-hunting recently to dig into Orange County’s urban legends and to check out some of the area’s most haunted places. There are the usual campus legends and lore, and even some creepier places beyond our campus that are worth a visit.

Take a moment to think of a fairy tale. You may be conjuring images of prince charming, frog kisses, a castle, a villain or a strong man saving the princess. And they all lived happily ever after. Russian fairy tales, on the other hand, do not include a princess charming or a beautiful maiden; they include evil old witches who eat children.

Halloween not only bewitches the United States with trick-or-treating and jack-o-lanterns, this frightful yet delightful holiday has cast a spell on many countries, making All Hallows’ Eve a worldwide celebration. Some of these worldwide traditions have even crept their way into U.S. culture.

Engorged Eyeballs, Butterbeer, and Brittle Bones.

These hopeful jack-o-lanterns wait for you to pick them up. The one to the left hopes to become a wolf, the one in the middle hopes to be a Mickey Mouse and the one to the right just wants to be loved. Endless possibilities.

On Halloween, kids get the opportunity to dress up and assume another identity. For me, it wasn’t enough to just dress up as a witch; I wanted to be one. When I was little, my sister and I would pretend we had magical powers like Sabrina, the teenage witch. We wrote a book of rhyming magical spells and rode around on our mom’s vacuum cleaner, like Sabrina did on TV. We dreamed of having magical powers and of discovering an Other Realm through the linen closet.

It’s not really that weird to fall in love with a serial killer…right? I mean, I watch “Dexter” like it’s my job and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen just about every single “Law and Order, SVU” ever made at least twice. I’ve seen “American Psycho” upwards of 10 times and every time I finish, I fall deeper and deeper in love with Christian Bale.