Mid Autumn Festival in Beijing

This would be our very first Mid Autumn festival away from home back in Malaysia. When we were back home, mid autumn festival were celebrated with my in laws and my youngest sister. After dinner, we would gather at our car porch, tabled laid with all sort of biscuits, cookies and the most important of all, moon cakes of every variety and fillings.

Lanterns will be hung across the car porch while the children will have a ‘FUNstatic’ time playing with their individual lanterns and candles of course. Lanterns back home comes in different shapes and sizes and Ryan’s favorite of course was his ‘Ultraman’.

However, we have much difficulty trying to lay our hands on some decent lanterns here in Beijing. We simply could not find them anywhere. We thought that we did not know where to search and hence we have been asking every local we came across, from the waitresses at Jamaica Blue, our daily morning coffee hang out to the illegal taxi drivers whom have became our friends over the last nine months.

One of these taxi drivers said he knew of a possible mall where we could get some and took us there last Saturday morning. We spent over an hour there before we came across this ONE store that has some in stock. They were nice and inexpensive, approximately RMB10 each. We bought six. Now that we have our lanterns, the next item to hunt for were the candles and that we have to buy from another store (and the only one who carries them) for RMB20 for 8 pieces per pack.

Finally, we have our lantern and our candles. Then we realised that we do not have any stick to tie the lantern to. We asked our driver friend if he knew where we could buy some. To our pleasant surprise, he drove us around on the way home and stopped by the road side, where he saw some broken branches, got down and stripped some sturdy ones for us.

With that solved, we were ready for the night. We got our Ayi to cook some noodles for the night and we have invited Coleen and her son, Slevin who is also Ryan’s best friend and neighbour to join us that night. It will be their first taste of celebrating mid autumn festival. Being Americans who have stayed in China for the last 6 years, they have heard about it but never really experienced it.

To complement the fried noodles, I made some simple appetizers for the night, mango salsa, oven baked crispy potato skin with mash potato and minced beef, and oven grilled crispy thinly sliced French loaf with minced beef dip.

 Mango Salsa, a combination of ripe mangoes, red capsicum and chopped mint leaves with lemon zest and lemon juice.

Oven Baked Crispy Potato Skin with mash potato and minced beef filling.

Oven grilled thinly sliced French Loaf with Minced Beef dip

Our newly employed Liew Ayi’s birthday falls on the following week. In keeping with our tradition and practice, where we have always celebrated our helper’s birthday back home, we bought a small birthday cake for her but kept it as a surprise. When we brought it out and sang her the birthday song, I can tell that she was pleasantly shocked.

 The children helping Liew Ayi to blow off the candle on her birthday cake.

To complete the night, we lit our lanterns and walked around the park within our apartment’s compound with Zoewe, our toy poodle happily tagging along. To our amazement, we made several heads turned when we walked past them with our colourful lanterns and some even stopped to take pictures of us with their mobile phones.

We are unsure of our future plans next year and whether we would still be in Beijing for the next mid autumn festival but for now, this year’s mid autumn festival was indeed something different from the previous years and an interesting chapter in our adventures in China.