Mid-Autumn Festival

We celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is is one of Taiwan's more important holidays, with Matt & Holly Smucker. They live in town, in an apartment complex, and so were blessed with a "Mid-Autumn Festival Kit." It contained: a grill, coals, bread, sausages and some other unidentified meats, and a few other items. Matt had a little zippo-sized torch, and so he & Kris made many attempts to light the grill. Finally, we had to ask a neighbour who was barbequing up a storm with his family (about 30 of them!), to help us out. So, here comes this guy with a giant bonfire torch and blasted the coals. Thank goodness - we would have been out there barbequing for hours :).

Throughout the evening, several curious neighbours came around to see what these foreigners were up to, including a boy who declared himself as "Fish." He is one awesome kid - he helped us barbecue, and was incredibly polite - even declining the requisite number of times when we offered him food before accepting! However, he wanted us to slather barbecue sauce over everything - even the corn - just the way the Taiwanese like their barbecued foods. Fish was also amazing at telling time. I asked him when he needed to go home, and he said at about 10pm. I asked him how he would know since he didn't have a watch. So he leans back, looks at the sky, and then proceeds to tell me that it was about 9:30pm. I look at a watch, and sure enough, it was! He used the clouds and the moon and their positions to figure out the time!

In any case, I'm not sure what the barbecue has to do with the Mid-Autumn Festival. This festival, also called "Zhong Qiu Jie" (中秋節), is sometimes also called the Moon Festival, which I understand a bit more since there's always a full moon at the celebration. I just looked up the meaning behind the festival, and found out that we missed doing some of the following:

• Eating moon cakes outside under the moon (we ate them inside, and before the festival)
  
• Putting pomelo rinds on one's head (oops... we just through the rinds away)
  
• Carrying brightly lit lanterns (not done)
  
• Burning incense in reverence to deities (we worship Jesus, so again, not done)
  
• Planting Mid-Autumn trees (we have no green thumbs)
  
• Collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members (I haven't seen any dandelions anywhere around here)
  
• Lighting lanterns on towers (No lanterns, no towers)
  

Kris & Matt working hard on lighting the fire.

"Fish" and a friend.

The Barbeque Gang

The Story of the Mooncake:

I love mooncakes - the lotus paste filling - mmm... I'm not as big a fan of the salted duck egg yolk in the middle, but I love mooncakes too much to let those get in the way! Here's the story of the mooncake. When the Mongols took over China, some of the Chinese decided to plan a rebellion, coinciding with the Mid-Autumn Festival. They planted notes inside the mooncakes saying that the date of the rebellion would be the 15th day of the 8th lunar month (Mid-Autumn Festival), and sent them to thousands of people under the guise of blessing the longevity of the Mongol emperor. The result? Overthrow of the government and the establishment of the Ming Dynasty.