Making wishes...

Lotus Flowers and Devil ears are essential to celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival!









Yesterday was the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. All week I have been researching how this day is celebrate by talking to my chinese friends and looking it up online. I learned that Mid-Autumn festival was to be spent with family eating moon cakes watching the moon. I also discovered it was customary to do kareoke and wear grapefruit peels on your head.


Armed with this information I was ready to celebrat this holiday the chinese way. Sunday I was to spend the day with my Homestay, which I thought appropriate since this day was to be spent with family. I had a wonderful day watching a movie showing shoulin monks doing kung fu, drinking tea, eating all sorts of yummy vegetables, and learning about Tibitian dance all with my host Shouwie and his parents.


We then met up with other PLU students and their hosts to enjoy a dinner of chinese "snack food." At first I was curious as to what was considered snack food, but when I found out I was pleasantly surprised. The meal started like most of our group meals with plates of food brought out family style, however it quickly shifted to small individual dishes brought out to each person. This dishes were nothing like american food and ranged from sweet rice soup to gooey balls filled with poppy seed sauce to cold noodles in spicy sauce. I really enjoyed the meal and they had been told ahead of time I was vegetarian so I was only given meatless dishes---so nice to not have to worry about what I was eating!

After dinner we headed back to the dorm and prepared to go to Karoake as I had been told was costumary on this holiday. However, we never quite made it. What I had not been told about this holiday was that it was also a tradition to light lanterns and release them with a wish into the night sky. As we returned to campus we observed this phenomenon all along the river that boarders the university. We eventually decided to join in. As a group we purchased many lanterns and climbed up to the dorm roof to release them. On the first lantern we all wrote a wish and sent it up into the sky together. Some of us then precieved to light and release our own individual lanterns. After lighting mine with help from others in the group, I released it and watched it until it vanished from sight. It was a very magical experience. After we were done lighting our lanterns we stayed on the roof and continued to watch the night sky, which was filled with beautiful red and yellow dots, and the flowing river, which was filled with pink candle floating lotuses. Of course I also brought moon cakes up on the roof too so we could enjoy those and we observed the festivities. It was an amazing evening!