Festival Week

        October Holiday is Almost here!!! Shelby, Marissa (girls from the Beijing tour) and I are getting together to go to Hainan! (It’s China’s Hawaii) I am suuuuper excited :D But so a little bit more about the holiday! The Moon festival (also called the Mooncake or Mid-Autumn festival) falls on September 30th in 2012.

        Every year on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, when the moon is at its maximum brightness for the entire year, the Chinese celebrate "zhong qiu jie." Children are told the story of the moon fairy living in a crystal palace, who comes out to dance on the moon's shadowed surface.

The legend surrounding the "lady living in the moon" dates back to ancient times, to a day when ten suns appeared at once in the sky. The Emperor ordered a famous archer to shoot down the nine extra suns. Once the task was accomplished, Goddess of Western Heaven rewarded the archer with a pill that would make him immortal. However, his wife found the pill, took it, and was banished to the moon as a result. Legend says that her beauty is greatest on the day of the Moon festival.

        She has a rabbit though….I haven’t discovered what the rabbit is about yet…haha.

So this week was Festival Week! And boy has it been crazy. Hahaha. To make up for October Holiday (a whole week off of school) we have Saturday school, so it’s been a long week! Monday we made moon cakes, Tuesday we learned Chinese songs, and Wednesday we had a fair! Oh my it was awesome! They had little booths set up all over the school with different things for the kids. They had extravagant key chains and necklaces made out of string (it puts my boondoggles to shame…that’s for sure), cotton candy, and butterflies and grasshoppers made out of grass. Yeah it amazed me. If I saw it sitting on a leaf outside I would DEFINITLY think it was real. And they do it so quickly! Okay, well it takes like 5 minutes, but still, for how extravagant they are? That’s super fast. Hahaha. They also had these really cool candy sticks. They would have a hot pot with a hard candy boiling so it was liquid, and then they would scoop it up with a spoon and just start drizzling it really quickly, and then all of a sudden it was a rabbit, or a butterfly, or a mouse, it was INSANE! Then they put a stick on it, wait about 30 seconds and then use a spatula to get it off, and vwala! You have an animal shaped sucker thing! I was fascinated! Hahaha. They also had clowns and balloon makers, it was great fun :)

 On Thursday we had a big assembly, and everyone in the school had to wear either red, yellow, or both…except I didn’t get the memo until I got to school….so I made a necklace out of ribbon and these colored wooden things (I made them beads….haha). My kids sang their anthem and then we went out the assembly, and it was so cute! They had a mini marching band, and they were dressed up, and then actually marched and played well! And then they had about 50 kids in army outfits marching behind them all, it was a flag procession. It was awesome! I took a video of it :)

Taro and Duck

       On Saturday it was a pretty lax day, but our lunch was a traditional moon festival meal. We ate meat moon cakes, beans, duck, and taro root. The moon cakes were DELICIOUS (oh but I have to tell you, normal moon cakes? Not really a fan…I haven’t tasted many that actually taste good. I don’t really count the Haagen-Dazs ones as authentic haha), and the taro is actually good! They look and have the texture of lavender colored potatoes. The duck was good too, but hard to separate from all the bones. The beans really through me off…they were just incredibly furry and tasted kind of….fermented? Don’t know if that’s the right word, but I didn’t really enjoy them…haha but all in all, the meal was not too bad! :)