Mid Autumn Festival

So I have successfully put off writing this post for a while now. And since I haven't been studying for the past hour and don't anticipate studying for the rest of the night, it seems like the perfect time to write this out. :)

Last weekend, Saturday, Sumana, Sungwon, Andrew and I went to our local friend, Yannie's house for dinner. She invited us Friday night and it sounded like a pretty spectacular idea. After our 10,000 Buddha adventure we quickly made our way back to UST and changed out our batteries for our cameras and went back to the MTR station to make our way to Tsuen Wan. We transferred onto the red line, at Prince Edward, heading to Tsuen Wan and met Yannie at that stop. Its so fun to go on a different line of the MTR. You get to see so many different things and Saturday we went on two different lines - I love exploring! Anywho, we made our way to her building and we got to her apartment building where we proceeded to climb up to the 29th floor! Oh my goodness! Her parents were so welcoming and it was so nice to be an a home-like atmosphere for a change. Her flat was a 2 bedroom. It was a really nice building and my battery was dead for the first half of the evening otherwise I would have taken pictures of her family/our dinner table full of people from diverse backgrounds!

Yannie 's mom made vegetarian food especially because Sumana and I were coming to her home- so nice of her! We started off eating/drinking a bowl of vegetable soup and then as soon as the bowl was cleaned out we started with the main courses. She made a mushroom dish, a noodle with beancurd dish, and a preserved egg dish along with a couple meat dishes for the meatitarians. Oh and Rice. How could I forget the Rice of all things?! It was a really interesting experience to eat with her family! They were so hospitable and asked us all about our homes and our majors and what we liked to do. We had a rerun of America's Got Talent on in the background which kind of made me giggle a little bit. We talked about Korean movies for a little while and then after we finished eating we broke out some traditional fruit.

They served starfruit and persimmon. I had never tried a persimmon but boy was it delicious. From the outside, a persimmon looks like of like and unripe tomato. It was so sweet and delicious. I highly recommend it. After the fruit, Yannie's family brought out the mooncakes. They had one traditional mooncake which everyone shared (I wasn't a fan) and various types of snowy mooncakes. Snowy mooncakes are the ones that are frozen/served cold and have a variety of different flavors (like delicious mango) and traditional mooncakes have egg yolk in the middle (not my cup of tea). Yannie's dad was telling the four of us, while Yannie and her mom were in the kitchen area, that he likes traditional mooncakes more than snowy ones because it reminds him of when he was younger and his family was struggling more and they would gather at Mid Autumn Festival time and share mooncakes and enjoy each other's company. It was so sweet. ;)

After we finished, Yannie took us to the harbour area/park area near her home. She surprised us with paper lanterns that we could play with ourselves! We lit the bottom of the candles and stuck them into the inside of the lantern and then pulled up the paper part and Ta-Dah!- a wonderful lantern. We got to the park and we weren't even in the main section and everyone had their lanterns out, little kids had glow sticks attached to them in all sorts of paterns (a bunch of little kiddies had glow stick wings) and people were just having a good time. We took our laterns and walked toward the park area and when we got there we saw a lot of people sitting in circles with their friends and/or their family and they were playing with candles and talking and laughing and playing games. It looked like everyone was having a really great time- that life was just so simple and fun and that they should enjoy it when they can. We kept walking and saw all sorts of different types of lanterns. I saw a bunny rabbit lantern, a hot air balloon umbrella, an airplane lantern (which made me think of my brother), and many others. I have some pretty good pictures that you should look up on facebook/picasa that will give you more of an idea about how everything was laid out.
We walked all the way to the Tsuen Wan MTR station where they had a huge dragon blow up and the start of an even longer walkway with flag lanterns lighting the pathway. We took pictures in front of it and then kept on our way.

Sumana and I sat on a bench after the others left for a little while. We just took in the entire scene and just tried to soak it all in. It looked like so much fun. A big street party where everyone stays out really late with friends and family and plays with candles, lanterns, plays gamed, (apparently a lot of the people around my age go to the beach and hang lanterns and drink and all). The Chinese actually arrange it so that the day AFTER the Mid Autumn Festival is a holiday because they know that everyone will be out super late, spending time with family. Sounds like a pretty smart idea to me!

I know that the "place to be" on Mid Autumn Festival is Victoria Park/Causaway Bay because their decorations are amazing but I am actually really, really happy that I ended up with Yannie. I got to see the not so touristy part of the Mid Autumn Festival (there were no internationals at this park) and I am so thankful to her for inviting us in to her home!

Overall- it was a pretty exciting, fun filled day!