Mid-Autumn Festival

One week into classes and I’m already on holiday! China goes by a lunar calendar and right now it’s the fall equinox, known in China as the Mid-Autumn Festival. During Mid-Autumn Festival, people get together with friends and family, watch the full moon, and eat moon cakes – rich, dense, extremely fattening little pastries stuffed with a variety of different fillings, such as red bean, peanut, pork, preserved egg, fruit, and lotus seed paste. The cakes are elaborately decorated and packaged, and ever since I got here I’ve been seeing people carrying around expensive-looking moon cake gift boxes to give to their friends, family and coworkers.

It seems that it’s also an unofficial tradition to climb mountains on Mid-Autumn Festival, because we had invitations from three different people to climb some of the nearby mountains over the holiday. We ended up climbing Mount Jinying, about a 20 minute bus trip from the campus. The trail starts at a busy street and winds through lush bamboo forests all the way up to the top of the mountain. It’s not wilderness, though – the trail is paved the entire way with stone steps, there are roads, restaurants, farms, hotels and shops all up the mountain.

Along the way we stopped at a rambling Taoist monastery and then at some kind of super-rustic restaurant which seemed to operate out of someone’s house, complete with laundry hanging from the eaves in the courtyard and the family cat attacking our feet while we ate. The restaurant had a Mah Jong table and while we waited for our food our Chinese friends taught us a simple version of Mah Jong, which, it turns out, is almost exactly like Rummy. Lunch was a typically excessive affair: our friends ordered noodles with egg, thinly julienned potatoes and green peppers stir fried with a heavy dose of mouth-numbing Sichuan pepper, spicy deep-fried fish with tofu, stir fried eggplant with garlic and chillies, strips of cucumber sautéed with ginger, some kind of spicy pork dish, stir fried peanuts, cabbage in broth, and rice. After we left the restaurant we bought dessert from a street vendor selling cleverly shaped caramelized sugar lollipops.

We spent most of the day meandering our way to the peak. When we got there, we hung out for a bit, took some pictures, ate some moon cakes, and then walked back to a bus station near the top of the mountain to catch a bus back to the campus. Exhausted, I got back to my dorm room and finished my excellent day with an excellent dinner – a bag of “intense and stimulating numb and spicy hotpot flavour” potato chips. These things are bloody amazing. I’m bringing a case back with me.

Chinese word of the day:
中秋节 Zhōngqiū jié
Mid-Autumn Festival