Blue, harvest or strawberry

Current mood: Drifting
Current music: There ain't no music on the _ _ _ _ (Guess the word)

Have you guessed today's topic from the title? Yep, it's the 'Moon', though I'm darned if I know why one would call a particular full moon a 'Strawberry Moon'. Apparently it's a Native American term for a full moon in June... Maybe that's when you get strawberries?

Sunday was the Mid-Autumn Festival - the fifteenth day of the eighth month, according to the lunar calendar. The moon is supposed to be at its roundest and fullest (well, it did look strangely bigger), and Chinese people celebrate by giving and receiving and eating mooncakes (not unlike the passing around of Christmas presents, only mooncakes are generally edible, whereas you can never tell with presents). This is an old, old custom - in fact, many dynasties ago in ancient China, there was a rebellion against the Mongols who'd taken over at that point, and mooncakes were used to hide the secret message signalling the uprising. These days there isn't that much rebellion associated with mooncakes, but there are loads of different kinds you can buy because the Hong Kong populace likes novelty. Well, let's start by explaining the traditional ones. They're usually chunky, round or square in shape, with the manufacturer's company name stamped on it. The outside layer is golden-brown and sort of cakey; the inside contains sweet lotus-seed paste and one or two salted egg-yolks to offset the extreme sweetness. These mooncakes can be quite nice, though only in small doses - they're very rich. Then you get the 'snowy' mooncakes, which have a similar appearance to traditional mooncakes except that they're white, and they have to be eaten cold. I'm not sure what the outside is made of but it might have something to do with glutinous rice. The filling probably uses a sweet green-bean paste as a base, though they add all sorts of exotic flavours these days, just so they sell to a curious public - sesame, red-bean, blueberry and wasabi (!) to name but a few. (Wasabi is that green 'mustard' made out of horse-radish, which you usually find accompanying Japanese sushi. It's very spicy. Which crazy cook decided to put it in a sweet dish?) Finally you get ice-cream mooncakes - mmm! They're basically an excuse to sell a few scoops of ice-cream in pretty packaging for an extortionate price, but what the heck. The outside's chocolate, the inside's ice-cream or sorbet... What more can one ask for?

Anyway, during the Mid-Autumn Festival, the kids get to play with lanterns and lights. Sadly, I did not have a paper lantern, a funky flashing light or a glow-stick to wave about - I didn't have so much as a dead glow-worm lying around - so I went to see a display of lanterns in the park instead. There was a rather impressive "landscape" where a Chinese garden - complete with flowers, pagoda, lake, boat, people, and a whole bunch of animals - was represented using nothing but carefully crafted lanterns. Nice.

Also I set off a wish-light, where you write a wish on a piece of paper, fold the paper into a boat, place a lit candle into the paper boat and set the boat on water. It's not a traditional Chinese custom - I heard it's actually Thai - but nevertheless it was good fun and the lights shining over the water were very pretty indeed. It took forever to get my candle lit though. It was windy that evening and the candle flame kept blowing out. Maybe the wind thought it was its birthday candle, and kept making wishes of its own...

There's a Chinese myth that there's a lady on the moon. She didn't originate from the moon though. Her name is Shang-Er in Mandarin, and it's said that her husband was a hero who then became corrupt when he got into a position of power. He'd obtained the elixir of life, in order for him and his wife to become immortal - why do all these evil power-hungry blokes want to live forever? Anyway, Shang-Er didn't think it was a good idea for a corrupt man to be a ruthless ruler for all time, so she sneaked off with the precious elixir and drank it all, so that he wouldn't get any. I suppose she must have neglected to look at the label on the bottle ("Do not overdose! May cause light-bodiedness"), because she started floating up, higher and higher and higher, until she wound up on the moon. She's got to live there forever, because she's immortal now. It must get pretty dull up there - where are all the people and the places to go on Saturday night and the songs (no air, no sound!) and the birds and flowers? Oh well, at least she has the Jade Rabbit to keep her company.

Don't ask me how the Rabbit got there.