Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Both in Hong Kong and across East Asia, today families are gathering together to celebrate what is comparable to Thanksgiving in the US, and is the 2nd most important Chinese festival of the year (after New Year). People will sit in the parks, eat mooncakes together and watch the children play with lanterns and flashing LED toys.

NB - Hong Kong has got the holidays right. Mid-Autumn festival itself isn't a public holiday but the day after is...no need to worry about going to bed with the full moon still high in the sky.

Mooncakes

Mooncakes are a vital part of the celebrations. They look almost like pies - flaky pastry traditionally filled with lotus root paste, a nutty paste, or red bean paste, and some also have salted duck egg yolks inside.

Every event I go to, from first lectures, to our first floor-meeting, the past week has involved sharing lots of mooncakes. I've had lots of flavours from a modern fruity tea flavour to a traditional nutty one that reminded me of a smooth, dense peanut butter although the egg yolk is a bit... too strange for my liking (I've been told it's a marmite thing).

I'm looking forward to tomorrow when they all go on sale, like an xmas sale and I can try some more flavours, such as the 'snowy white mooncake' and Haagen-Daas ice-cream mooncake.

I didn't have any good photos of the inside...so credit to Flickr
(https://flic.kr/p/pdH7d)

Thanksgiving
My celebrations started last weekend, where I got involved in a project with my University to visit the elderly and give them a Mid-Autumn mooncake gift. Hong Kong is a busy, fast-paced modern city and unfortunately this has left a lot of elderly residents feeling lonely and isolated as their children move far away or have little time to visit them. The aim of this project was to give the elderly a chance to talk with someone, to meet some of the university's students and to let them 'celebrate' Mid-Autumn festival with somebody.

Last weekend, I was paired with two local, cantonese-speaking students (most of the elderly speak little, if any, english) to visit the homes of four older people in Hong Kong. Although I couldn't talk to them directly, the power of translation helped me learn that the elderly of Hong Kong are a diverse, vibrant bunch who will always work hard and keep a smile on their face.

My favourite visit was to an 81 year old lady who told me her favourite thing to do in Hong Kong is visit Disneyland, but she also quite likes the rollercoasters in Ocean Park. Then she explained she sings in a choir and I was lucky enough for her to sing her favourite cantonese songs to us....until she wanted to hear the three of us to sing. My fellow students sang beautifully, but the only song I managed to join in with was Jingle bells, where the cantonese version sings 'Ding dong ding' instead of 'Jingle bells, jingle bells'. What can I say, I tried.

After a long day of walking around Kennedy Town between flats, we were lucky enough that the last lady we visited treated us to a cup of chinese tea and a bowl of fresh slices of orange. It was a lovely end to the day, where I hope we were able to put a smile on a few faces, and I got the chance to have a glimpse into everyday life of Hong Kong.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

Tai Hang Fire Dragon
Yesterday, a group of us began the real celebrations and visited the Tai Hang neighbourhood to see the traditional fire dragon dance. A 220ft long dragon made of straw, covered in incense giving it a fiery sparkler-like appearance danced through the streets carried high and mighty by young adults to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival.

Tai Hang Fire Dragon

After getting extensively lost and fearing we missed it, we eventually found our way to where we could hear the dragon's drums and see the crowds trying to get a glimpse. Worried we would never get close enough as we stood on a half-empty side street, a local near us explained that the dragon has to be carried along every street in the area, and their long windy route takes a long time but will come right up next to us.

Soon enough the procession began down our narrow street, and we were greeted with a drummer that stopped beside us, playing the rhythmic beat for the dragon. Whilst we could not yet see the dragon, we certainly noticed a wave of foggy smoke and the strong smell of incense drifting in the air above us.

Drum-roll....

After a minute of getting the beat, the drummer was pushed down the street on his float and what felt like hundreds of young men began to blaze past us, holding the dragon high in the air as it raced down the road. From the large, fiery dragon head which swirled and circled up and down and left and right across the street, to the long thin body in which we could feel the glowing heat of the incense warm our cheeks, running straight down the street.

The Dragon's head

The Dragon's body

The best part came at the end, where the tail reached where we were. It suddenly swerved from the centre of the line to smash itself against a little shop sign before swooping low over a group of ducking police officers on the side of the road - from what the local told us earlier, I have no doubt somebody was unlucky enough to have a little hot ash fall on their heads.

Victoria Park Lantern Festival

We were also lucky enough to have a wander through the nearby lantern festival (a day before the massive crowds thankfully). Only hours before, we had a short but heavy rain that resulted in some beautiful reflections on the soccer pitch of the lights and lanterns above. Walking past these, you get to see some beautiful shaped lanterns and glowing lights - everything from the traditional lanterns to a neon castle and space guns and gameboys. It's a real reflection of Hong Kong's love for ancient traditions integrated into a high-tech westernised world.