Green Tangerine, Strawberry Pie (or mooncake in this case)

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Wednesday was the Mid-Autumn Festival which, as far as I can tell, is like Chinese Thanksgiving.  In that for Mid-Autumn Festival, you get together with your family and eat lots of grapes and mooncakes.  Since it’s such a family oriented festival, a lot of our students were getting antsy (antsy is a word that means you can’t wait for something. You can also say “ants in my pants”). So, we decided to have a mini-break and not have PE or reading time or computer lab and have a party instead.

Me eating a mooncake

So Alicia and I went and bought 15 mooncakes of all different varieties from the bakery in the alley and told our class we would celebrate at 7:00 pm. Well, the Chinese love a party, so all of our people show up with like, two watermelons and three bags of grapes and apples and peaches and green tangerines and sunflower seeds and peanuts and drinks and I don’t know what else.  And we went to town.

An aside about mooncakes: No matter how much it looks like they are stuffed with chocolate…. they are not stuffed with chocolate.  The strawberry ones were good, the date ones pretty good, the egg yolk kind surprisingly good for being egg yolk and I still don’t like the red-bean kind.

omnomnom

Then Alicia and I and a few of the girls in our class got invited to a maybe slightly against the rules party outside of the dorms on the men side (gasp!) which was really awesome. Unfortunately I have no pictures of this event. All of the men were there (there are only maybe 15) as well as Ethan, and maybe six girl students, and Mark, Alicia, Adam, Tiffany, Akil, Geoff and I.

Fruit!

Geoff and Akil played guitar and the rest of us gathered around a table of three desks pulled together with stools tucked around.  Small tea-candles shown from among the laden table of random meat products that I had no intention of eating and a small mountain of beer.  Endless toast were decreed, and there was much singing and gazing at the beautiful full moon in a surprising cloudless Beijing sky.

I think last night will be my favorite memory from this