中 秋 節 快 樂!

In case you can't read the title of this post, it says "Happy Mid-Autumn Festival" in Chinese...I wanted to see how Blogger would handle Chinese in post titles =P

Anyway, as you might have guessed, yesterday was the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on the night of the Harvest Full Moon on the lunar calendar. I went exploring to take more photos of the various decorations around Macau, then at night a bunch of us brought mooncakes and other snacks to Hac Sa beach, which is also a very Macanese tradition for this holiday. There isn't much more to say, so I'll just post some of the better photos here (more on Facebook, as usual).

Massive pink bunny at Tap Seac square

At night --> more creepy, less cute

Big lantern in Lou Lim Ioc garden

Tableau at Sintra Square

*flips the ON switch*

Our mooncakes and other snacks

Lots of people and lanterns at Hac Sa

Time to sleep now...back to work tomorrow!

Bunnies everywhere!

Starting last Saturday, I've been seeing a lot of these little guys around:

They seem to be made of wire and fabric - there's also a magenta pink version. At first, I saw them near an advertisement for some sort of children's amusement park, so I thought perhaps the bunnies were the mascots, and they were providing extra-visible publicity for the park opening or something. Today on the bus to work, however, I saw this at the top of a building:

I didn't get to photograph the whole thing, but it has a bunch of animal/vegetable figures interposed with the Chinese characters for "Happy Mid-Autumn Festival" (中 秋 節 快 樂). Therefore, I realized that the bunny statuettes are also supposed to be part of the Mid-Autumn Festival decorations, representing the white rabbit that is supposed to be the pet of the moon goddess. At the New Century bus stop, they even have some that are playing instruments, like this one:

Reminds me of Kevin (-:3

For whatever reason the bunnies are there, they made me laugh in the middle of a crowded morning commute, so it's all good =D

Agenda for this weekend: Fulbright retreat at the Kadoorie Institute in HK!

Mooncake mishap

Tonight after work, Susan and I went to get mooncakes at Sanmiu, the local grocery store. We needed to get at least two boxes as gifts, one for the security guy who has been super-helpful, and one for the UM Chinese teacher who went to Zhuhai to get textbooks for us even though we didn't end up taking her class.

After we picked out two boxes of white lotus paste cakes with egg yolks for them, we were super-excited about getting a box for our apartment to share. I recognized one box from mooncakes I've had in the US, but it was more than twice as expensive as any of the others! We didn't want to spend too much money, so we decided to try one of the locally-produced brands (but not the cheapest one). Susan is not a huge fan of red bean and I've had a lot of red bean-flavored stuff here already, so we opted for lotus paste again. The box looked promising, with a pretty cover that even featured the Ruins of St. Paul:
Susan wanted to try one of our mooncakes for dessert, but when we opened the plastic wrap, a very...inauspicious scent came out, a salty sort of oily smell. She cut it open, only to find a bewildering mess of chunks rather than the white paste we had expected.

Ick.

Turns out we didn't get lotus paste...we got "Five Nuts" filling instead -_- The ingredients list only shows lotus seeds, but we also spotted what we think was walnuts and sunflower seeds (not sure what the other two nuts should have been). There was an egg yolk inside, as promised, but it wasn't that great either.

The label we didn't see until too late

We're not sure what to do with this box of undesirable mooncakes, but on the bright side, if I avoid eating them, it'll be better for my cholesterol (the nutritional information on those is scary!) Maybe I'll just get one red bean cake for the Mid-Autumn Festival, then get a box when it goes on sale post-Festival =P