It’s holiday season in China and it all started last Monday, 24th September. With a full moon shining, everyone celebrated the Mid Autumn Festival. We headed to Hong Kong for the weekend and visited family and friends. I must add, traveling late Friday evening is much better as the border crossing was very quiet unlike the week before when we went on a Saturday morning, ooof.
Based on the lunar calendar, the Mid-Autumn Festival corresponds with the bright orange glow of the Harvest Moon. Lots of people take time out from work and reunite with their families, light lanterns, eat mooncakes and gaze at the luminescent night sky. It’s been celebrated for over 3000 years in loads of places like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam and Singapore.
Everywhere you go there are images of bunnies and mooncakes. I actually mistook mooncakes for pork pies. I’d see an advert on the metro and say ‘Look, they have pork pies out here!’ Half of Wal-Mart was dedicated to the sale of these things weeks before the event. I’d say it’s on a par with Easter in the UK for retail madness. We got some as a gift, but after we sampled them, they soon went off to a charity outreach centre. Each little pie is roughly 1000 calories and tastes like a years worth of sugar in one bite. Oh and there’s a hard boiled egg in the middle, why???
Next up is Golden Week and this one is serious. It starts on the 1st October, National Day. This and the next two days are national holidays in China, two days in Macau and one day in Hong Kong. Most people usually take either the weekend running up or the days after making it a general holiday between 1st and 7th October. Hence why this is called Golden Week.
National day celebrates the founding of the People’s Republic of China which happened on October 1st 1949.
We’ve been reliably informed that this week is travel hell. We had planned on testing out the new high speed rail link, 24 minutes from our local metro station to Kowloon Honk Hong. We might save that for another time as I’d love to do a full blog on the experience without it being tainted by huge crowds of travellers.
We’re planning on heading back to Hong Kong this week as my wife and daughter are off school till next Monday. Just one problem- man flu! I guess it was just a matter of time before I contracted it in China. I’ve not had a bout of the fictitious virus since 2017 when for at least one week I’d moan about how severe this particular strain was. Now I’ve experienced the illness first hand I can tell you it’s just as bad as British Man Flu, if not a touch worse.
All being well I’ll post an update of our holiday antics next week 😛
