Mid-Autumn Festival
Beijing, China.
Today (Sunday) is the mid-autumn festival in China. It’s a festival celebrating family through the idea that on this day the moon is at its fullest and biggest and even if your family is far away you can all look at the same moon and feel closer together. Tonight I will be looking at the moon and thinking of my family who are usually pretty far away since they live across the U.S. from me, but are now very, very far away. So far that they can’t even look at the moon at the same time as me! But that’s okay. It’ll be a nice symbolic gesture all the same. On this day Chinese people also eat and share moon cakes. Moon cakes are little round cakes with Chinese characters decorating the top and filled with different things like nuts and fruits. We accidentally ate one at a bakery a few days ago not realizing what it was and they were okay. So instead of eating a moon cake today we’re going to get a moon ice cream cake from the dairy queen near our hostel! We’ve seen lots of people coming out of there with little, hand-sized moon ice cream cakes and it seems like a nice way to get a yummy ice cream treat while also celebrating the holiday!
Today we’ve decided to be lazy. After days of walking around the very large city seeing sites, we need a break. Yesterday we walked around the different shopping districts looking at everything from pearls and jade to giant replicas of the terracota warriors and silk clothing. Some of the malls are very geared towards tourists with everyone yelling at you “Hey Lady, so pretty, try on jewelry!” I’ve never been called “lady” so many times in my life. I don’t think I like it. But some of the other stores were very relaxed and we weren’t bothered too much. I bought a little calligraphy kit and a book to practice writing some of the Chinese characters I’m learning. We went to a trial Chinese class on Friday and even though we missed four lessons (it started on Monday), we did pretty well so decided to stay and keep taking it for the next two weeks. It was a real bargain at only 300 yuan each for 10 classes, 1 1/2 hours a class. In U.S. dollars that’s about $3/hour! There are three other girls in our class and they all seem very nice. So I think we’re going to really enjoy it. Already it’s been very helpful in just making sure we’re pronouncing the couple words we already knew correctly! And we learned a few new things like asking someone’s name and how are you. I’m really enjoying it, and I’m exciting about also learning the characters to help decipher some of the signs or write things down if I can’t remember how to pronounce them!
But I guess we’re not going to be completely lazy today since we’re going to start planning out where we’re going to go after Beijing and when we think we’ll arrive in Guilin so we can let the volunteering place know to expect us. We’re thinking about planning on being there around the beginning of November and then if we run out of time on the way down to see everything we want to see we can always go on weekend excursions to places nearby Guilin or go to the places we missed that are farther away after our month of volunteering.
We took a day off of site seeing yesterday, too, and opted for the shopping since we were both getting burnt out on the Chinese architecture. The same thing happened to me in Italy when we were visiting lots of museums. After a while I just couldn’t appreciate the artwork anymore. It all started to look the same. And with the Chinese architecture and Buddhist statues, they all sort of look the same, so the burn out hit me quicker this time. I think we’ll probably go to the Forbidden city tomorrow or next weekend in order to have a full day there but also to appreciate it better. Our Chinese lessons take up the whole morning between getting there and getting back, so we only have a few full days in order to do the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. Everything else we want to see can be done in the afternoons.
Tags: Beijing, China, Chinese lessons
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