Are you having trouble coming up with the perfect Halloween costume? Are you okay offending the incredibly nice people in this incredibly conservative country? Here are our suggestions.
A Zip-line Accident Victim: This Halloween, bring the horror of a harness failure to life. Not much is required: a branch protruding here, a dirty bunch of leaves hanging from there, and a whole lot of fake blood everywhere. Bonus: a shredded gardening glove on the left hand for righties, and vice versa.
Finless Shark: With 400,000 sharks finned in Costa Rican waters last year, what could be more brutally distasteful than showing up to the party as a gutted shark? Although some will assume that your swimmies are halfway to Hu Jintao’s bowl, they’ll be delighted when the rest of your crew busts in disguised as your bloody amputations.
Bag of Urine: Protestors worldwide are known for throwing things. Rocks mostly, or papers with cleverly worded slogans, but here in Costa Rica they’ve raised the bar with the ultimate water balloon of discontent: a bag of urine. Commemorate Costa Rican uniqueness by wearing yellow and wrapping yourself up in plastic, or just skinny jeans and your best angry face, your own pee in hand.
Transsexual Hooker: “¡Qué guapo papi!” If you’ve ever ambled along Tranny Alley, an open-air urban brothel and apparent headquarters for the conspicuously incontinent, then you have surely been solicited with a similar catchphrase delivered in the baritone of some six-foot, trick-turning transsexual. Your gear should include heels, an umbrella (a transsexual hooker is always prepared), and a whole lot of attitude.
Rambunctious Riptide: You know who you are. You’re the Gringo who routinely gets drunk, picks people up and carries them around. This Halloween, you can actually have a good reason for doing this when you masquerade as Costa Rica’s most terrifying natural phenomena: the Rambunctious Riptide. Dress in blue, pick people up, carry them into the sunset, no questions asked.
Gallo Pinto: Satirize the nation’s most popular breakfast by covering yourself in black round balloons (beans) and long white balloons (rice) and force everyone to pretend-eat you at all times. For extra fun, douse yourself in Lizano Salsa. You’ll be the delicious snack everyone wants a piece of.
Yoga Yahoo: No group in Costa Rica is scarier than passionate yogis. Apparently unaware that their exercise of choice should really be called “stretching,” they pay exorbitant sums to breathe heavily and assume inane poses. To portray one of these yahoos, simply don some pants that aren’t quite long enough, carry around a mat that reeks of B.O. and act smug.
Gored Gringo: There is nothing more hilarious/horrific than a Costa Rican bullfight, which inevitably ends with an intoxicated Gringo getting a sharp one through the neck. Get drunk, cover yourself in blood and stumble around asking for more beer.
Slutty Centenarian: Costa Rica’s Nicoya peninsula is home to one of the world’s five “Blue Zones,” where people routinely live to 100 and beyond. It doesn’t get more terrifying than a wrinkled face that’s endured the horrors of a century … until you imagine that wrinkled face in a bikini. Ooh la la. Someone’s not going home alone tonight.
Zombie Tico Times: You thought Tico Times was dead, right? Wrong! We’re still online and technically that qualifies us as a zombie newspaper. To demonstrate your clever wit while serving as a walking advertisement for our undead publication, cover yourself in old Tico Times newspapers and run around muttering about ad sales and/or eating brains.
