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<\/a><\/p>\nA box of the college moon cakes.<\/p>\n
Mid Autumn Festival<\/p>\n
Wednesday was the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar calendar and thus Mid-Autumn Festival, an important Chinese cultural festival.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The week before felt like midsummer, but Mother Nature adjusted herself to provide the correct environmental ambience.\u00a0 It was a beautiful brilliant blue sky day at a perfect temperature.\u00a0 It\u2019s said to be a celebration of the end of the summer harvest, but there\u2019s still much to harvest in my area.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are various stories about the festival.\u00a0 One involves a woman who drank a potion designed to make her husband immortal.\u00a0 Immortality was to have been his thanks for saving the earth from too many suns.\u00a0 She flew to the moon and was unable to return to earth.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0She told the moon rabbit to make her a potion to allow her return to earth and is still waiting for it. \u00a0Her husband pined for her and offered incense & fruit to the moon.<\/p>\n
Another story relates how the Chinese hid a message of rebellion in moon cakes knowing it was pretty safe as the Mongols didn\u2019t like eating them.<\/p>\n
Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated with a day off work and I was informed that those who manned the shops and so on were entitled to double pay. \u00a0\u00a0Many workers have 3days off work, but we only got one.<\/p>\n
The Chinese also celebrate the day by getting together with family, eating moon cakes and observing the moon.\u00a0 Moon cakes are a pastry containing a vast variety of possible ingredients.\u00a0 Most are very sweet.\u00a0 The ones around here are composed of 5 nuts and also a red bean paste. They come in a variety of sizes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Last week a program on TV showed small kids making clay figures of the Moon Rabbit as a means of having fun and learning about their traditional heritage.<\/p>\n
The college gave the foreign teachers two boxes of moon cakes.\u00a0 It was most unexpected.\u00a0 The box is red and gold and the cakes are fairly large requiring a good appetite or a knife.<\/p>\n
A box of the college moon cakes.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n