Chinese mid-autumn festival

We're becoming the cool kids who have so many international friends we have to blog in English. No joke. Last Monday was the Chinese 中秋节 mid-autumn festival which used to be a family holiday to celebrate the end of harvesting and beginning of darkness. Nowadays it basically just gives us a day off from school. (Which is great!)

According to the old Chinese lunar calender, mid-autumn festival is the day the moon is said to be the brightest and roundest. The moon symbolizes family unity and you're supposed to go back to your family for dinner. There are to be red lanterns everywhere, even flying ones in the sky, and people put paper boats with candles on the lake and make a wish. Basically, you have a nice meal and then you go out to look at the moon, eat mooncake (a sweet pastry) and spend time with your family and friends. We had been talking about this mid-autumn festival in class for a whole week and we were all pretty excited to go out and see the what ancient Chinese culture had to offer us. Lars was imagining it to be like Norway on the 17th of May, we weren't quite sure about that, but we didn't want to hurt his feelings so we didn't say anything.

My teacher told us Houhai lake would be a good place to celebrate the mid-autumn festival, so a bunch of us jumped in a taxi and met up by the waterside. Houhai is a really nice area with bars and restaurants all around the lake. There were a little more people than usual, but other than that it looked exactly like it does any other day of the year. No extra lanterns, no candles, no ornaments and decorations, no overjoyed Chinese families looking at the moon and most importantly; no mooncakes. We couldn't even see the moon because the sky was gray from pollution. Needless to say, we were all extremely disappointed. It seems like Chinese people don't bother to celebrate. Maybe they are to busy working. Maybe we should have gone to the countryside. There are a lot of maybes.

I dont know. I just know that we went to a rooftop bar and drank over-prized tsingtao and ate sweet popcorn (and I hate sweet popcorn). But the more beer came to the table, the better our mood. We saw a red light in the sky, though we're not sure wether it was an airplane or a flying lantern, and newly made friends from our new classes kept on arriving. At the end of the night we'd had a great time. And that's when I figured out that it doesn't really matter what our surroundings look like, the point of the mid-autumn festival is spending time with the people you enjoy, in our case: our great little Beijing family of awesome classmates. Which means we were doing exactly the right thing.

And that was today's moral lecture. Here are the photos.