Everyone has the day off today! Why? To recover from all the moon watching last night.
As far as I can tell whether you call it the Zhonqiu or Mid-Autumn Festival or how i like to call it, "Moon Festival", it is really about two things: mooncakes and lanterns. Under the bright harvest moon augmented with lantern light, families get together to celebrate and eat moon cakes.
During the day n Hong Kong's Mid Autumn Festival, Hong Kongers seem even more rushed than useral. They are either rushing around in the jam packed Temples or out in the streets trying to get their hands on Mooncake or some seafood at the Markets for that nights feast like they were going to be sold out any minute - One of those people being me. I am not a Moon cake fan at all, so i tend to buy Haagen Daz's Ice-Cream Moon cakes but they are often sold out for sure!
In the Evening people are often having dinner with the Family. It's a bit like Thanks Giving. I went to my Grandmothers home today for dinner. I arrived at around 5PM and she was already super busy in the kitchen preparing so i popped opened a nice wine with my Grandfather - yes, we decided to get wasted before the dinner haha! Oh this is the view from their balcony. You see the bright lights on the right? That's where we headed after the dinner - Victoria Park's Lantern Wonderland Carnival!
So i talked down to Victoria Park with my family to check out all the festivities and boy was it packed! Roads were blocked, lot's of traffic and a lot of police and first aid. It started to look a little like Carnival back in London. LOL! But of course, more romantic since it was night lol!
Everyone camps out with their families and lights candles and lanterns to pay homage to the moon.
The picnicking in a park makes it a little like the Fourth of July and little kids wandering around with lanterns and glow-stick adornments makes it a little bit like Halloween.
The Japanese and Korean community in Hong Kong were also here to celebrate, men and female wearing beautiful Hanbok and Kimono, strangely it was the chinese that didn't really bother dressing up for this event, i only saw a few little kids wearing Cheongsam haha! It was cute still.
Pictures taken with Panasonic Lumix GF1 with Pancake lens.
omigod.. it's so beautiful :( I miss celebrating events like this in Hong Kong & China >_< I hope you had a wonderful mid-autumn festival with your family!
ReplyDeleteYeah it was great, this time we did get a couple of hours to come & waltz around for a while, but I was not feeling so good after my flight, think I picked up a bit of a cold+sore throat kinda thingy, so didn't stick around for too long, and the thunder storm & rain today made me feel like hiding in my bed all day, but even so we went and had a little bit of a laugh, the atmosphere was pretty good this year, I took four of my employees again this year, as a kind of treat or bonus for hard work this year, then brought them some dinner + a cash bonus, they were flabbergasted that they won it again..\☺/
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I always look after my staff very well, they all get "Lucky Money" and "Christmas Box" (a UK bonus thing) from me each year, so all are kept happy!
Anyway, nice to see these pictures/photo's and hear about the good time that you had with your grandma & grandpa, in years to come you'll look back feel happy that you got to do that with them, in so doing, you also gave them a whole load of happiness too!
Oh well, better get on with it now, got my headcold to deal with this week!
Look forwards to the next major event in HK.
I'm off to Macau on Saturday for 1 day, (bizniss az uzhual)but maybe we might bump into one another, who knows, anything's possible nowadays...☺/ Ciao ~ Angeli Santi