Happy Moon Festival!

Lovely card!

Do you plan to eat moon cakes? Here, they're all so expensive, and people are already queuing up for them.

Oh yes, no one can avoid mooncakes here! Huge family dinners and gathering. The traditional cakes are very heavy and rich and not to my taste, although one can never avoid at least one
There are now some modern and lighter ones, also Icecream (Hagen Daaz!!)ones and various others. I am off to watch the moon on Sunday night on the roof of a friend's house. Big BBQ and lots of lanterns to light.

I've never even heard of mooncakes (sorry for my ignorance), can you enlighten me?

Well, they are a traditional cake made of pastry with all sorts of fillings that are moon shaped and given as gifts at Mid Autumn Festival, which is a bit like Harvest Festival. The fillings vary but the real old ones have a whole egg in the middle(a duck egg) If you google it you will see all the types from all the areas of China, and from Taiwan etc. Business people give boxes of them at this time, some are very pricey indeed.
The story is that the Mongols had captured parts of China and the people were oppressed. They needed to communicate secretly in order to plan an uprising. They put written messages inside mooncakes and gave them out to friends, in order to give details of where to meet.

Westerners find them very heavy and the health conscious go for less sweet or fatty versions.

Thanks for the explanation Ren! A google search has trhown up some images of what look like extremely yummy, and extremely rich, goodies!

Yes. Thank you Ren. Very interesting. The moon here was beautiful last night, worthy of a festival, and I hope you enjoyed your gathering.

Thanks, and we really did. The tradition in this area of HK is to send up small hot air balloons as lanterns (this is highly illegal and you can only buy them over the border) So we were sending them up by the dozen , until a police car pulled up in the car park, and we stopped until we realised all the neighbours were at it and had NOT stopped. The sky was full of them in all colours, lovely. We had great food and lots of drinks and laughs. A friend who used to live here was over from OZ so it was extra special. Yes, a great night. For once the moon was clearly visible, which means good luck.

Lanterns here

Thanks, Ren.

Flickr have some lovely photos too. http://blog.flickr.net/en/2012/10/01/mid-autumn-festival-2012/





lol! No moral fibre!